Conference

Aleksandar Boskovic : Underground Šišmiš Radio

On The March 4, 2020

18:00 to 20:00
Masaryk Room - SSEES
16 Taviton Street - London WC1H 0BW - UK

UCL - SSEES "South East Europe Seminar Series" with Aleksandar Bošković (Columbia University)

This talk examines the underground “Radio Bat” show aired on Radio B92 every Monday throughout the “occupied” Belgrade ether during the 1990s. Run by one of the pivotal figures in Belgrade’s counterculture art scene, a Serbian radio disc jockey Miomir Grujić Fleka, the late-night three hour long Šišmiš Radio was one of the most remarkable, albeit marginal, voices of the urban underground resistance during Milošević’s rule. The talk will analyze the diverse narrative, vocal, musical and medial disruptive strategies Fleka successfully employed in his “anti-show FM cabaret” in order to offend, irk, and provoke apparently drowsy citizens—or, as he called them, “zombies”—within the capital of what, at the time, was both the nonexistent SFR Yugoslavia and its self-proclaimed mutant version of FR Yugoslavia.

More information : UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Aleksandar Bošković teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research interests include Russian, Central and East European avant-garde literature and visual culture, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literature and cinema, and literary theory. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (2008) and a number of essays on issues of digital mnemonics, Yugonostalgia and cultural memory, avant-garde photobooks and ciné-zines, Serbian poetry and post-Yugoslav fiction. He is currently a fellow at the Collegium de Lyon in France.