5. Tuesday, July 15, 2025, 12:00 pm (NY): "Singing Socialism Now: Communal Forms of Artistic Engagement in the Face of Neoliberal Exhaustion"

This lecture engages with the key questions explored in my recently published book Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (OUP, 2025), addressing the potential and limitations of collective singing as a means of organizing against the adverse effects of neoliberal capitalism. Over the past two decades, self-organized choirs, that have emerged in Yugoslav urban centres, have been recuperating Yugoslav and international antifascist and socialist song repertoire. Revitalization of these legacies aims to demask the privatization, dispossession, and the erosion of workers’ and social rights, that, instead of a promised capitalist dreamland, have shaped lives in the region after the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia. I explore the forms of communal artistic engagement as the everyday leisure activity in their capacity to disrupt neoliberal exhaustion stemming from the material conditions of life structured by the transformation of leisure and rest due to the dismantling of the infrastructures supporting free and public cultural activities. Key questions I discuss in the lecture include: How does the current global context compel us to reassess the “lost” historical knowledge and lived experiences of Yugoslav socialist project, particularly in the realm of art and culture? What role do nonprofessional, communal musical practices play in fostering structures for anti-capitalist organizing? Finally, what can the focus on an amateur artistic engagement reveal about the broader process of envisioning alternative, anti-capitalist modes of social organization today?