The lasting image I retain after reading Nataša Kovačević’s Nonaligned Imagination (1) is that of the friendship between Aimé Césaire, the renowned Martinican poet and politician, and Petar Guberina, the Yugoslav and Croatian linguist, cultural critic and diplomat. Both were students in Paris in the 1930s and, as Guberina recalls, they “lived on half a kilo of bread for months” (1), adding, “Poverty brought us together.” (1) This friendship not only conjoined the Black Atlantic and the Balkan Adriatic, but also, retrospectively, demonstrates the intimate connections between anti-colonialist movements and anti-fascism – one of the red threads in Kovačević’s account of literary nonalignment.

“In the summer of 1935, Césaire – too poor to travel back to Martinique – visited Guberina, a child of peasants, in his native Šibenik on the Adriatic coast, where the nearby island of Martinska serendipitously reminded him of home and where he famously began writing his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.” (1) Césaire and Guberina’s friendship keeps echoing in my mind not only because it is a striking opening scene of the book, nor only because of my personal fondness for the seas – the one I grew up by, those I have visited and those I may never visit – but because it powerfully captures a moment in which two homologous battles are figuratively joined into one: “‘[T]he battle against racism’ has to go hand in hand with ‘the battle against fascism and human injustice’.” (1) Kovačević’s book traces precisely how diverse but globally homologous struggles were recognized as mutually related, and brought together by the massive work of writers as diplomats, and through channels such as leaflets, journals, organisations and institutions – altogether “developing the polynomia which [was] not yet realized” (2).

Current academic culture still tends to separate (European) anti-fascism from anti-colonial struggles originating in European colonies worldwide. Mainly focused on discourse and less concerned with historical alliances (3), contemporary liberal-democratic forms of anti-racist and decolonial critique only reinforce this artificial division. This is because historical understanding remains shaped by ready-made Eurocentric assumptions, requiring adherence to a value system of ‘lesser crimes versus greater crimes’, thus implying a disconnect between colonial atrocities and national socialist concentration camps. History written from below, and from the perspective of those who remain in the ‘lower ranks’ of world-system geography, views colonialism as a variant (a precursor or training ground) of fascism, and therefore as cast in the same mould. Colonial crimes thus appear as an episode in a larger continuity, which does not end with liberation from fascism, but is replayed in atrocities orchestrated in the present – in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and elsewhere.

Kovačević undergirds this “retrospective realization that colonialism is similar to the fascism that Europeans experienced” (39) with a claim put forward by thinkers such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore and Frantz Fanon: “fascism is merely colonialism spread belatedly, but inevitably, through Europe” (39). She also adds, with Césaire, that Europeans tolerated fascism “until it had been inflicted on them” (39). Comparing colonial extermination of entire peoples with the Holocaust in this context is not to relativise history or to make any of these crimes less evil, but primarily to suggest, Kovačević claims, that “one cannot compromise with the British or French any more than one could coexist in the face of Nazi concentration camps” (39). A “violent war of liberation” (39) was therefore a necessity. Experiencing fascism as inverted colonialism – a colonialism returning home – peoples historically relegated to European “imitation and periphery” (3) can readily see the connections between centuries-long Ottoman and Habsburg imperial rule, Nazi occupation, attempted Soviet control and contemporary exploitation by Western capital as forming a single hereditary line. Yet their self-perception as “plundered nations” (3) can easily be dismissed as another exaggerated self-victimisation narrative. Recently, when I was speaking with an Austrian colleague about the relationship between Europe and the Global South, I remarked, half-jokingly, that Yugoslavia could also be considered a European pocket of the Global South. Absolutely not, he replied with the authority of a historian. First, Yugoslavia no longer exists (and, accordingly, its epistemologies do not exist either); second, Yugoslavia was Europe. Yes, it was, but at the same time it was not. This is not only because it was Europe’s colony, but also because it harnessed its resources to dismantle this omniscient Europe, the planetary policeman. Whether we regard the idea of “plundered nations” (3) as a form of self-victimisation or not, this narrative, however baleful it may sound to the possessing and powerful colonial ear, has nevertheless enabled the emergence of a multiethnic, socialist and decolonial culture (2) within this same colonial continent. Kovačević calls this a “Fanonian” (3) opening.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), both politically and culturally, has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. While its political and cultural significance has previously been examined in a series of edited volumes and individual essays and articles (4), Kovačević’s book is the first comprehensive study to focus on the literary output of this globally prominent political alliance. What emerged from the NAM is inconceivable without the context of the Cold War, as the NAM sought to offer alternatives to the binary divisions imposed by both the capitalist West and the socialist East. By examining related novels, diaries, travelogues and nonfiction writing, as well as literary and cultural studies, Kovačević explores extra-literary institutional ties, looser cultural networks and “epistemic communities” (3) that enabled the decolonial discourse of the NAM to emerge and flourish. Animated by the thinking of Césaire, Fanon and C. L. R. James, and facilitated, inspired and often also commissioned by participating states, their leaders and representatives, selected narratives critically illuminate inherited Eurocentric frameworks (racism, fascism, imperialism) and Cold War binaries (east-west, capitalism-socialism etc.). They also demonstrate why categories such as ‘Third World’ and ‘Second World’ are inadequate for understanding the geopolitical position of Yugoslavia (7), which was situated not only between the capitalist West and the socialist East, as Cold War historians often suggest, but also between the Global East and the Global South (8). This shift in geopolitical perspective, incorporating sophisticated readings of selected literary works, is an important intervention in the existing body of scholarship that Kovačević undertakes. At the same time, it is a study of literary authors as cultural diplomats – a role that, with the professionalisation of diplomacy and its effective disappearance from international relations, now appears to have become historical.

Connecting the Black Atlantic and the Balkan Adriatic through the figures of Césaire and Guberina, Kovačević interweaves “multiple imperial legacies” (5) but focuses on a specific Yugoslav “internationalist sensibility” (3). Therefore, it cannot be considered representative of the NAM as a whole. This particularly concerns the Yugoslav declarative and, in many ways, practical break from European legacies, to which Yugoslav histories were made subservient as imperial subjects. However, because Yugoslav peoples – including petty-bourgeois nationalist elites and the emerging Yugoslav middle class – often leaned to ‘enlightened’ and ‘industrially progressive’ achievements originating from the West and were thus rarely concerned with the inhuman world geography underlying Western ideas of progress, imperial legacies proved persistent. Even after South-Eastern Europe was liberated from Fascism, these ‘alliances’ were not completely overcome (5). Thus, Yugoslavia’s Fanonian opening was marked by an ambivalence, the author claims, which was not a Yugoslav specificity but was typical of global semiperipheries, torn between the position of “inferior imitators” (6) and the idea of a “nonaligned international community” (16).

The book’s Introduction (“On the Cultural Front Lines of the Cold War”, 1–21) is animated by the “spirit of Bandung” (4) – a spirit that, despite critical observations on the limitations affecting the NAM, interweaves the subsequent chapters. These address “Revolutionary Travelogues as Archives of Radical Friendship” (23–53), specific “Nonaligned Literary Aesthetics”, including “Postcolonial (Dis)enchantment” (55–85), extraordinary figures of “Literary Ambassadors” and their particular “Cultural Third Spaces” (87–121), “Decolonial Scholarship Between the Periphery and Semiperiphery” (123–150), and, ultimately, “Nonalignment as Epistemology” (151–161). Rather than summarising the arguments, I discuss what, in my reading, are the book’s highlights – dimensions that extend beyond its specific object of interest and should inform any future worldmaking.

Particularly in their focus on literary authors as unique cultural diplomats, the individual chapters show what the Introduction tells: that “culture and art, in contrast with the economy, can more easily escape (neo)colonial control” (5). From the standpoint of what is now called the ‘creative and cultural industries’, this form of genuine ‘worldmaking’ – rather than mere cultural ‘mediation’ – may seem unlikely, yet Nonaligned Imagination shows that it is, or was, indeed possible. However, this is contingent on culture and art not limiting themselves to acting “from below” (155), but rather that bottom-up perspectives – even when they express dissent – are generally aligned with the “literary and cultural ‘worldmaking after empire’” (155), as sustained by political mechanisms implemented ‘from above’.

For those familiar with Yugoslav facts and figures, I list the names of the most prominent adherents and practitioners of nonaligned aesthetics. In individual sections, Kovačević brings into conversation Oskar Davičo’s revolutionary travelogue Crno na belo (Black on white, 1962) with Dobrica Ćosić’s diary Piščevi zapisi, 1951–1968 (Writer’s notes, 1951–1968, 2000); furthermore, Čedomir Minderović’s semi-autobiographical novel Poslednji koktel (The last cocktail, 1961) and travel essays in Tragovi Indije (Traces of India, 1966) are read in contrast with Rodoljub Čolaković’s Utisci iz Indije (Impressions from India, 1954); finally, Svetozar Petrović’s Dnevnik iz Indije (Diary from India, 2012) is read in parallel with Sveta Lukić’s essayistic work Kineski pečat (The Chinese seal, 1982). These revolutionary travelogues, diaries and novels showcase Yugoslavia’s “divergence from Soviet and Chinese socialist realism and Western modernism alike” (19), but most importantly, they also function as negotiators of the “scopes of postcolonial freedom” (3) and the nonaligned idea itself. While nonaligned cultural production in Yugoslavia was not institutionalised through a single editorial series or a publisher specialising in nonalignment, related perspectives were published and debated across various journals, most notably Polja, Kultura, Naše teme, Kulture Istoka, Sveske and Književna smotra (20). These journals were not limited to local authors but were open to and encouraged exchange with voices from the Global South. Thus, reflecting on contemporary discourses on decoloniality, Kovačević argues that Yugoslavs “made an early contribution to the development of global decolonial theoretical discourses, while also adapting those same conceptual tools to Yugoslavia’s semiperipheral position” (20). Given that much of this history has been forgotten and even actively erased (with the Yugoslav war not being the only cause, but also the aggressive implementation of neoliberal and, in many respects, neocolonialist politics and policies), Kovačević mentions “the ironies of scholars from (semi)peripheral spaces having to borrow concepts to speak about their own peripherality” (154). At this point, and with the book as a whole, she rightly advocates for the recovery of the “Yugoslav region’s autochthonous tradition of decolonial thought” (153), which is not singular but shared: “I propose that we unearth these shared histories, missed opportunities, and nodes of potential solidarity, while ‘making solidarity uneasy’ by also addressing the many asymmetries and antagonisms that marked this movement.” (21)

Another reason for, if not active erasure, then at least inadvertent ignorance of this autochthonous tradition of decolonial thought is language. I quote in full Kovačević’s remarks on the inevitability of English in contemporary scholarship, including the reminder that a large portion of nonaligned literary communication circulated in languages other than English: “My endeavor to bring cultural production and scholarship from languages of the Global East to bear on the global circulation of knowledge may be quixotic given that I must translate them into English to enable broader critical conversations – about, among other things, nurturing literary and cultural production in peripheral languages, a point that pervades nonaligned debates about the possibility of non-Eurocentric ‘world literature.’ Nonetheless, I believe that this is one way to remedy a situation where knowledge production, even in Global South studies, as Alfred J. López notes, is mediated primarily through scholarship in English, while scholarship written in the languages of the Global South by local scholars remains sidelined. While this project would have been impossible without the knowledge of multiple languages, some of which are peripheral, and while it addresses audiences invested in cultural connections unmediated by imperial metropoles, it also testifies to the near impossibility of escaping English as a global ‘cultural system.’ Interestingly, when it comes to Yugoslav nonaligned narratives, information was often gathered or exchanged without the mediation of hegemonic Western languages – the authors spoke or translated from Russian, Chinese, and Hindi, for instance. Yet, as I argue in chapter 4, the difficulty of escaping the Eurocentric linguistic framework continued to present a problem, as it does today: Many works of literature by nonaligned authors were indirectly translated in Yugoslavia, most often from preexisting English or French translations.” (9–10)

Echoing the spirit of the NAM, Kovačević reminds us that “global peace can only be secured through active anticolonialism” (28). The “revolutionary travelogues” served this purpose and, from today’s perspective, should be studied as “archives of radical friendship” (28). Kovačević does not define this radical friendship, allowing the reader to discern its dimensions from the profound intensity that connected not only Césaire and Guberina, but also a series of other friendships populating the pages of the travelogues she examines. In contrast to persistent colonial overtones – still evident in the imperial bearing of state leader Josip Broz Tito – which shaped the imagination of South Slav colonial travellers in earlier historical periods (Kovačević references Dragutin Lerman, the Seljan brothers and Rastko Petrović, 27) – revolutionary travelogues are already “conceptual blueprints for connecting the histories of antifascist and anticolonial resistance” (29). This encompasses not only narratives of “brotherhood in arms” (36), such as strong solidarity and military support for the Algerian National Liberation Army, but also a conceptual decentring of historicising fascism solely in relation to national socialists, fascists and numerous European quislings between 1939 and 1945.

Another highlight of this book is its ambitious framing of nonalignment as an aesthetic that is, firstly, firmly rooted in the cultural right to creative autonomy and, simultaneously, based on the expectation of overcoming biased imperatives to think in terms of either-or – what the author calls “a move toward cultural autonomy that parallels nonalignment in the political sphere” (19). This tertium datur is essential because it clearly outlines not only conceptual parallels but also historical interconnectedness between the Yugoslav idea of a supranational revolutionary culture and the concomitant calibration of the national idea in the Global South. The anti-colonial idea of art serving the revolution resonates with the then already post-revolutionary synthetic vision of Yugoslav supranational identity as proposed by Miroslav Krleža – not as an essentialist collective or a new ‘race’, but as the expression of “our civilisation”, which emerges as a “third component” (6). This identity could only be established after socialism had been realised. Importantly, this “third component” was regarded as “strong enough to persevere by following its inner law of motion, and resistant enough not to passively submit to stronger, more civilised powers” (7).

If the “soft power of the literary” is still believed today to “act as a political balm” (101), it is worth revisiting those authors who, as literary ambassadors, actively created so-called “third spaces”. These spaces, however, have little to do with the colonial mimicry theorised by Homi K. Bhabha, and are more effective in negotiating stronger positions for their own visions of planetary solidarity. One such audacious moment was the hosting of the PEN congress in Slovenian Bled in 1965. Yugoslav literary ambassadors were sceptical about hosting PEN “as an organization dominated by the West” (102). Yet, being aware that this was the first PEN Congress not only hosted by a socialist and, moreover, a nonaligned country, but also attended by Soviet observers, Yugoslav literary ambassadors used this opportunity to open the congress to voices from both blocs and the Global South, including Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Djamel Amrani, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag and Leonid Leonov (102). Kovačević demonstrates this as the real meaning of a nonaligned, “productive third space” (102).

Aligned with this nonalignment – and this is the ultimate highlight – is the principle of generosity. Originating from solidarity rather than philanthropy or debt-driven ‘partnership’, in the literary NAM, generosity meant, among other things, a circular economy, including the reinvestment of royalties (profits) back into respective communities and also rejecting royalties for translated works. A side note: In a recent email exchange in search of a translator for a larger volume of academic prose, a colleague offered the translation to a person who, however, could not accept. The reason was a tight deadline, which could be managed with the use of AI. However, as the colleague remarked, being so “honest” as not to even use DeepL, the person could not accept the assignment. How often does one encounter economic and technological self-restrictions of this kind today?

Literary nonalignment left some lasting traces, many of which have been successfully erased so far, but some persist to the present day. Institutionally, interest in Indian literature and culture helped diversify academic curricula (with Rabindranath Tagore as the most translated, and also predominantly uncritically read, Global South author in Yugoslavia) and promoted the idea of creating a “‘third’ market for peripheral literatures” (117). The University of Zagreb’s Department of Indology, established in 1959, remains a lasting monument to this (116). Regarding immaterial culture, and returning to the translator mentioned above, we may hope there are more of us who are socialist not only because socialism is a marketable label (a widespread phenomenon), but also because we are honest practitioners of nonalignment, that is, a generous and polynomial alignment.

NOTES

1. Nataša Kovačević, Nonaligned Imagination. Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025.

2. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 195.

3. See Neil Larsen, “The Jargon of Decoloniality,” Catalyst 6.2 (2022), https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/09/the-jargon-of-decoloniality?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR13Xsl74Ov8gkgTWszo6isgSW1IBnFTFxvEm%E2%80%A6.

4. A selection of which is as follows: Paul Stubbs’ edited volume Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political and Economic Imaginaries (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), Gabika Bočkaj’s PhD thesis A Quest for Translatability: Non-Aligned Affinities Between Yugoslavia and India (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2024), Barbara Predan and Daša Tepina’s edited volume The Culture of the Non-Aligned: The Clash of Cultural and Political Narratives (University of Ljubljana Press, 2023), Jürgen Dinkel’s The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927–1992) (Brill, 2018), Crosol’s edited volume Development Cooperation Through the Legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement (2015), ), Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nada Boškovska’s edited volume The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi–Bandung–Belgrade (Routledge, 2014), Rinna Kullaa’s Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge (I. B. Tauris, 2012); furthermore Chiara Bonfiglioli’s article “Women’s Internationalism and Yugoslav-Indian Connections: From the Non-Aligned Movement to the UN Decade for Women” (Nationalities Papers 49.3 [2021]: 446–461), Christopher J. Lee and Anne Garland Mahler’s “The Bandung Era, Non-Alignment, and the Third-Way Literary Imagination” (included in The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, edited by Andrew Hammond, Palgrave, 2020), Sunnie Rucker-Chang’s “‘Black’ Student Migration and the Non-Aligned Movement in Yugoslav Space” (Slavic and East European Journal 64.3 [2020]), Jelena Subotić and Srđan Vučetić’s “Performing Solidarity: Whiteness and Status-Seeking in the Non-Aligned World” (Journal of International Relations and Development 22 [2019]), Aleksandar Momčilović’s “Towards a Canon of the Non-Aligned: Yugoslav Literature(s) and Foreign Policy” (included in Yugoslav Literature: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Notion, edited by Adrijana Marčetić, Bojana Stojanović Pantović, Vladimir Zorić and Dunja Dušanić, Čigoja, 2019), Bojana Piškur’s “Southern Constellations: Other Histories, Other Modernities” and Teja Merhar’s “International Collaborations in Culture Between Yugoslavia and the Countries of the Non-Aligned Movement” (both included in the exhibition catalogue Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Moderna galerija, 2019) and finally Jeffrey James Byrne’s “Beyond Continents, Colors, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment” (International History Review 37.5 [2015]: 912–932).

5. This is demonstrated in Nikolay R Karkov’s excellent analysis of Dimitŭr Dimov’s presocialist novel Poruchik Bentz (Colonel Bentz, 1938) and socialist novel Tyutyun (Tobacco, 1951), which highlights the afterlives of racist epistemologies and their subsequent transformations in Bulgarian socialist realism. See “Race, Class, and Socialism: Lessons from the Work of Dimitŭr Dimov” (upcoming in the journal Contradictions / Kontradikce).

6. Miroslav Krleža, “Izložba jugoslovenskog srednjovjekovnog slikarstva i plastike” [Exhibition of Yugoslav medieval painting and sculpture], Jugoslavija 2 (autumn 1950): 52–61, here p. 55.

7. Ibid,