Croatian, Dalmatian, queer : new post-Yugoslav film and literature

This thesis examines select post-Yugoslav film and literature from the period 2010-2020 produced in Croatia, specifically works that are set in Dalmatia or autobiographical/autofictional works by queer authors. This thesis argues that they critique and re-inhabit the sites of exclusion where Croatian national identity is produced: the heteronormative family, standard language, and the conflicting touristic/provincial space of Dalmatia. The first chapter examines the autofictional novel My Dear You (Moja ti) by Jasna Jasna Žmak and the documentary film Family Meals (Nije ti život pjesma Havaja) by Dana Budisavljević, which utilize strategies of relational self-representation that go beyond identitarian representation, even as they also belong to a growing number of “out” writers and directors. They also enact reparative critiques of the Croatian language and the nuclear family, respectively. In doing so, they queer them, sabotaging their use to the maintenance of the monolingual or heteronormative nation and making them into more livable arrangements instead of sites of exclusion. The second chapter turns to the contested space of the region, where the image exploited for Croatian tourism of a timeless, cosmopolitan Adriatic coast is displaced or deflated by a series of works that center a gritty or provincial Dalmatia firmly grounded in the postsocialist present. This chapter also provides a reevaluation of an archetypal Dalmatian novel of this period, Olja Savičević’s novel Adios, Cowboy (Adio kauboju). Relying on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kathryn Bond Stockton, it argues that the figure of Danijel is a “queer child” whose ambiguity provokes paranoia even from the narrator about his unconfirmed sexuality, which is reflected by his narrative absence and perpetuated by his resultant unknowability. All these Dalmatian works ultimately pose a challenge to the tourism slogan “Croatia Full of Life,” asking for whom and under what conditions life is livable for those who actually live in Dalmatia.