We cordially invite you to a lecture as part of the Cultural History module by Iva Kosmos, PhD, on Tuesday, 20 January 2026 at 1:00 PM:
Yugoslav travel writers in the Third World: socialist contact zones and the anti-colonial production of knowledge.
In the first part of the lecture, I will provide a brief overview of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie ERA project at the University of Zagreb. I will present the project’s general rationale, scope, research questions and outputs, including a bibliography of Yugoslav travel writing on the Third World. The second part of the lecture will focus on one of the project’s central aims: to shed light on the anti-colonial – as Yugoslavs would have termed it – strategies in travel writing. Yugoslav travel writers were acutely aware that they inherited and naturalized imperial, colonial and orientalist imagery of Africa and Asia shaped by Western European literature, art, media and popular culture. As part of the broader Yugoslav project of establishing partnerships with post-colonial African and Asian states, travel writing emerged as the important discursive space for questioning and negotiating these relationships. Yugoslav travel writers sought to undo and unlearn their preconditioned reactions to and perceptions of Others by incorporating socio-historical education on the Third World countries, class and economic analysis, and constant self-reflection on one’s own production of knowledge. Considering the specific material conditions of Yugoslav travels and its distinct discursive orientation, I argue that these encounters unfolded within a specific socialist “contact zone” (cf. Pratt). Through a case study of travelogues and diary accounts by the Slovenian painter Jože Ciuha from Southeast Asia (Okameneli smehljaj (1963), Potovanje v deseto deželo (1966)) I will demonstrate the possibilities and limitations opened up by socialist contact zones and the perspective they produced.
The lecture will be held in English in the library of the Institute for Cultural and Memory Studies at ZRC SAZU, Trg francoske revolucije 7, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.
Iva Kosmos is a cultural studies scholar whose work brings together literary sociology, cultural and memory studies. Her research focuses on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary and cultural production, examining it in relation to broader social, cultural, and political frameworks and contexts. In parallel, she explored the memory narratives of socialist industrial workers. She was a researcher at ZRC SAZU (2017-2024) and currently holds MSCA ERA Fellowship at the University of Zagreb. She has co-edited the monograph Social Impact in Arts and Culture. The Diverse Lives of a Concept (2022) and Stories from the Can: The History of Fish Processing and Canning in the Northeastern Adriatic (in Slovenian and Croatian, 2020).
Photo by Eugenia Ai on Unsplash