Mobility Humanities

Based on passenger-seat ethnography with Yugoslavian-identifying people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article explores relationships between driving and the transformation of memory. I demonstrate how driving on decaying roads and the consumption of deconstructed Western popular culture—which so often provides the sonic background to such drives—are experienced as revealing the “public secret” of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s systemic flaws. Its systems of economic management and production, its foreign policy, and its domestic policy for addressing inter-ethnic tensions, including its approach to memory, render Yugoslavia perceptually as a nation always in state of simultaneous construction and deconstruction. In the processes of driving and listening, Yugoslavia is re-remembered increasingly as having fallen apart progressively rather than having unexpectedly collapsed. Furthermore, the Yugoslavia that was once experienced as home is now increasingly re-remembered as a place in which Yugoslavs never really belonged.