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"Razsa, Maple"
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Bastards of Utopia
Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or \"globalization from below.\" Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinching-an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth. More information on the film can be found at www.der.org/films/bastards-of-utopia.html.
eBook
The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming
In an otherwise sympathetic speech to Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek dismissed protesters' pursuit of direct democracy as a \"dream.\" In no small part responding to a perceived crisis of representative politics, however, the popular movements that swept through northern Africa, Europe, and North America during 2011 have been distinguished by their adoption of direct democratic forms. This initial ethnography—collaboratively researched and written by a Slovene activist-theorist and a U.S. anthropologist—considers the significance of the Occupy Movement's democratic practices in Žižek's own hometown. We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making—the \"democracy of direct action,\" as it is known locally—to activists' experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street's consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy.
Journal Article
CONCLUSION
My ongoing research, and its representation in this book, began to look very different to me in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2008. During my first period of fieldwork with radical activists in ex-Yugoslavia, from mid-2001 to late 2003, I struggled to interest Croatian journalists and public intellectuals in the activists with whom I collaborated—just as I struggled to arouse the concern of local human-rights organizations regarding the covert police surveillance and overt police repression my collaborators experienced. So it was with some trepidation that I returned to Zagreb in 2010 for the premiere
Book Chapter
GRASSROOTS GLOBALIZATION IN NATIONAL SOIL
On May 2, and again on May 3, 1995, rebel ethnic Serbs fired surface-to-surface missiles at Zagreb. Loaded with antipersonnel cluster bombs, each missile showered more than a hundred thousand deadly steel pellets down on the city center of Croatia’s capital. Several hundred were injured and seven were killed (Hayden 2012: 216–217).² A crowded tram was struck only a hundred meters from Pero’s apartment. While Croatia underwent far-reaching social changes in the wake of state socialism’s demise—the wrenching “triple transition” (Offe 1991)—it is the “ethnic violence” that accompanied the transition to independent statehood for which the former
Book Chapter
FEELING THE STATE ON YOUR OWN SKIN
Messages ricochet—crossposted, forwarded, commented upon, glorified, mocked, deleted—through a vast interlocking web of listservs. Though virtual, these links provide one of the clearest infrastructural maps of the movement of movements, the network of networks. Zagreb activists’ inboxes fill with calls to action, tactical debates, and news updates. Through the first half of 2003, we follow this flurry of electronic preparation for a “countersummit” against the meeting of EU member countries’ heads of state in Thessa loniki as Greece takes over the rotating EU Presidency.¹ Activists in Zagreb take the pulse of the broader movement, decide whether to participate
Book Chapter
STRUGGLING FOR WHAT IS NOT YET
As we approached the shuttered printing complex, I asked Pero if he thought this “night action” was risky. “Yes,” he responded bluntly. He then went ahead with Rimi and three others to force open the front door of Tiskara znanje (Knowledge Press), a shuttered factory that has not been in operation for several years. Pacho and I recorded from the car until Pero signaled that they were in. We rushed to join them. When I listen to the footage later, I am immediately back inside Knowledge—and I say listen because once inside we filmed in near darkness so our
Book Chapter
THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
Activists in Ljubljana, Slovenia, were already planning an encampment modeled on Occupy Wall Street (OWS) when they watched the YouTube video of Slavoj Žižek, their city’s most famous son, addressing the protests in lower Manhattan on October 9, 2011. They were stunned. Perhaps, they speculated, the experience of hearing each line of his speech echo out through the “people’s mic”—the collective repetition of a speaker’s words, developed when police banned amplified sound—had swept Žižek up in the “exuberance of democratic self-fashioning” (Garces 2011). Slovene activists had not expected Žižek to support OWS because, his international reputation as a
Book Chapter