In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences. An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

Bojana Videkanic is assistant professor of visual culture at the University of Waterloo.

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"Still, the problem of integrating national stories into greater, transnational narratives is a key challenge in the field today – a challenge that Nonaligned Modernism takes head-on. With its emphasis on larger socio-political forces and the institutional structures they engendered, the book offers a thorough, well-researched cultural history of a country that still deserves a more prominent place in the art histories of modernism, 'global' or otherwise." RACAR

“Videkanić calls for more attention to be paid to self-governing Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned Movement, with their message of resistance to Western capitalist and colonial hegemony through economic and political cooperation, cultural exchange, justice, and respect for sovereignty, with an eye to both the post-Yugoslav successor states and the global situation. This call is all the more urgent in 2023, when the consequences of Western capitalist exploitation and neocolonialism are becoming more and more evident, not least in the form of perpetual refugee crises, global warming, and the extinction of nonhuman animal and plant species.” H-Socialisms