Nation as narration: the (de)construction of “Yugostalgia” through Kusturica’s cinematic eye

This essay explores Kusturica’s cinema, mainly Underground (1995), in order to unearth the processes of identity construction and deconstruction in the Yugoslavia of the 1990s. It must be located at the specific crossroads where international (political) studies meet cultural studies according to a renewed interest in social ontologies, i.e. for identity and ideational phenomena at large as producing a web of intersubjective meanings which ultimately give substance and texture to the social world. I therefore draw on Cohen-Séat’s elaboration of film in terms of cinematic fact in order to clarify Homi Bhabha’s theory of the nation as a form of cultural elaboration and narrativity. Given that mass communication is nowadays integral to an understanding of a nation’s horizon, the mind’s eye of the filmmaker consequently becomes a first order mediator in reading and narrating the nation.