Mexican Studies Research Collective

by Nataša Kovačević

Northwestern University Press

Nonaligned Imagination reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a large alliance of decolonizing countries that opposed Cold War bipolarism and advocated independent development, antiracism, egalitarianism, and active peaceful co-existence. Drawing on the archives of socialist Yugoslavia, a founding member of NAM, I retrace the networks of writers, journalists, and scholars who connected Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. These networks shaped a nonaligned worldview through engaged travel writing that boosted support for anticolonial revolutions; exchange and translation that connected peripheral literatures without metropolitan mediation; aesthetic innovations that rejected Soviet socialist realism and Western modernism; and shared decolonial vocabularies that developed alongside material solidarities. The book fills a gap in the studies of Cold War cultures, anticolonial internationalism, and global socialism, while situating Yugoslav cultural production in a transnational framework.