The Lost Revolution: The Women’s Antifascist Front between Myth and Forgetting presents the history of the largest revolutionary women’s movement outside of Russia and China, which mobilised millions of women in the liberation of Yugoslavia by the Partisan armies during the Second World War.
A pioneering attempt to critically examine the revolutionary traditions of the post-Yugoslav women’s movements, the volume confronts not only the powerful forms of historical revisionism and organised forgetting of the present ‘transition’ to capitalism but also those of the socialist past. Rescuing the forgotten voices of the revolution from the vast condescension of the present, the contributors understand our present as history, the roots of and continuities in the privatisation of social reproduction, beginning from where the revolution stopped, at the threshold of the family.
The volume represents the culmination of a project to collect and make available online the official archives of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia, in particular its Bosnian and Herzegovinian section (http://www.afzarhiv.org/), undertaken by the Sarajevo based feminists Adela Jušić and Andreja Dugandžić within the collective Crvena (Red_Minded). The essays draw on unpublished archival material to provide original accounts of the revolutionary women’s movement and the gender regime created in its wake.
Viewpoint magazine is pleased to present the English translation of this work, edited by Tijana Okić and Andreja Dugandžić, as an important contribution to theoretical and political debates on the relationship between gender and capitalism, and between socialist revolution and social reproduction.
The Lost Revolution: Yugoslav Women’s Antifascist Front between Myth and Forgetting
Tijana Okić and Andreja Dugandžić October 3, 2018
