Yugofuturism as a Trap

I used a short surrealist story by French author Gisèle Prassinos, The Isle of Eternal Fungus, along with a series of Yugoslav journalistic books and texts (mostly published in the 1970s and 1980s) to define Yugofuturism as a utopian moment in the past of the SFRY that cannot be repeated. After its disintegration, it became fashionable to interpret Yugoslavia from an ahistorical perspective: Yugofuturism loses its position in time and becomes a concept, an idea. But if we go back enough in our study of literature, it is clear that Yugofuturism was a very concrete era that lasted a relatively short time. After the Communists’ initial futurist inspiration ran out, Yugoslav society turned from the initial communist utopia into a socialist grotesque. The essay discusses this disintegration.