Staging the Promises

Regular price €31.99
A01=Deana Jovanovi
A01=Deana Jovanović
Age Group_Uncategorized
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Ambivalence
Anthropology of the future
Author_Deana Jovanovi
Author_Deana Jovanović
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JBFZ
Category=JBSD
Category=JFFR
Category=JFSG
Category=JHMC
COP=United States
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eq_non-fiction
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Language_English
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Performing the futures
post-socialism
post-Yugoslav experiences of everyday life
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Forthcoming
Revival of industrial towns
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781501780134
  • Weight: 454g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Jan 2025
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Staging the Promises reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. Deana Jovanović chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town's authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Her book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present?

Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized.

Staging the Promises assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.

Deana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Deana studies how people make futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with airborne particles in industrial environments.