Deconstructing the Culture of Post-truth Under Slobodan Milošević: Milica Mićić Dimovska, her Novel Mrena, and its new Translation as the Cataract

Please join the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at Columbia University’s East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Jasmina Lukić, Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and Sibelan Forrester, Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

This joint lecture by Forrester and Lukić will shed light on the work of Milica Mićić Dimovska, one of the first women writers in the Balkan literatures to promote a gender perspective in contemporary fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. An engaging storyteller, exceptional stylist, and sharp observer of social life, Mićić Dimovska is also the author of one of the most important novels about the era of Slobodan Milošević. She deconstructs the institutional, cultural and media mechanisms of mass self-deception of the part of the Serbian population that supported Milošević’s prolonged rule. She unmasks the closed system of destabilization of all possible grounds for safe judgment, which produced a situation in which post-truth was effectively introduced in public spaces.

The 2002 novel Mrena, translated into Englsih by Prof. Forrester as The Cataract, was published in 2016, and it will be promoted at the lecture as an exceptional literary piece and a strong critical text that can speak to a number of comparable situations in today’s world.

Sibelan Forrester is Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She has published numerous translations of fiction, folktales, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian. Her translation of Mićić Dimovska’s novel THE CATARACT was published in 2016, with an introduction by Jasmina Lukić.

Jasmina Lukić is Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest. In 2014-15 she has been Cornell Visiting Professor with Swarthmore College. Her publications include two monographs, and multiple articles and book chapters in the fields of literary studies, women’s studies and Slavic studies.

From Columbia’s Harriman Institute.