Overview

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 Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.

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9781501779091

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Reviews

Staging Promises offers nuanced insights into the pragmatic workings of ambivalence, a way of hedging bets, seizing (short-term) opportunities, and gaining at least some agency in a situation of diminishing alternatives. * Slavic Review *

Author Information

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.

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