Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Regards from Serbia (2007), a comic strip diary by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian underground cartoonist, as an instance of the alternative, anti-nationalist oppositional media space during the Yugoslav War. Drawing on comics scholarship and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the article explores Zograf’s use of the fantastic and surreal aesthetics to depict the political spectacle of Serbian nationalism during the 1990s, a historical time which Zograf imagines as a collective dream or, alternatively, a nightmarish mass hallucination. The visual diary spans the entire decade of the 1990s, a period of war, privation and authoritarian rule in Serbia: from the internationally imposed sanctions in the early 1990s to the overthrow of the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milošević, following the U.S led NATO-bombing campaign. By examining the overall narrative progression of the comics diary and the use of surrealist themes, I view Zograf comics as site of dialectical images that critically reframe both the political rhetoric of Milošević’s nationalist regime as well as international mass media representations of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Underground comics
• nationalism
• Serbia
• war
• Walter Benjamin
• dreamwork

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lenier (2002)a catalogue for Aleksandar Zograf’s exhibition at Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco. Transcript available on-line: http://www.aleksandarzograf.com/whois.html.

2. As Levi notes, comic strip has been long considered by theorists of montage, such as Eisenstein and later Godard, as ‘aesthetically years ahead of film découpage,’ precisely due to the freedom, specific to the comics medium, it affords to the viewer/reader (see Levi 2012, 139–140).

3. See Hatfield (2005).

4. Some of the entries depicting the life under sanctions in Serbia were published previously in United States and in the United Kingdom. The second part of the diary is composed of an email correspondence and comics focusing on the NATO bombing of Serbia. As Stijn Vervaet notes, here ‘Zograf to a certain extent followed a general trend; apart from movies, diaries seem to have been one of the most popular genres to deal with the 1999 bombing of Serbia’ (Vervaet 2011). The last part of the diary, depicting the last months of Milošević’s rule and the aftermath of the regime change in Serbia, was created at the behest of Chris Ware and was published for the first time in the 2007 edition.

5. For a different position, one that more explicitly addresses crimes committed by the Serbian forces in the neighbouring countries, I would suggest consulting Joe Sacco’s comics, in particular, Safe Area Goražde (2000) and The Fixer (2003), both set in wartime.

6. Walter Benjamin, quoted in Susan Buck-Morss (Buck-Morss 1989).

7. I am borrowing here Miriam Hansen’s metaphor of gambling to describe Benjamin’s view of new media technologies. See (Hansen 2004).

8. This recoding of historical narrative into a dialectical image is perhaps most concisely expressed in ‘The Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ As Benjamin writes in the 5^th Thesis: ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up in an instant when it can be recognized and never seen again’ (Illuminations 255). The image of history acquires here a specifically temporal dimension, namely, one of fleeting instant. Further on, Benjamin reiterates this instantaneous temporality in a more unambiguously political manner in the 6^th Thesis, stating that ‘[h]istorical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger’ (ibid, my emphasis).

9. Lenier my emphasis.

10. Pištalo (2009) [6], my translation.

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Notes on contributors

Vlad Beronja

Vlad Beronja is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor (alongside Stijn Vervaet) of Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (De Gruyter, 2016). Currently, he is finishing his first monograph titled Archival Fictions: Cultural Memory, Literary Imagination, and The Yugoslav Wars.