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Staging the Promises

By Deana Jovanovic

Product Image: Staging the Promises

Staging the Promises

By Deana Jovanovic

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Description
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 Jovanovi¿ 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? Jovanovi¿ 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 Jovanovi¿, 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 Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
246
Release Date:
2025-01-15
Publication Date:
2025-01-15
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1501780131
ISBN13:
9781501780134
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
383 g
Height:
153 cm
Width:
224 cm
Thickness:
22 cm
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