SOC-ILL · Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

Picturing Modernist Future: Women Illustrators and Childhood Conceptions in Socialist Yugoslavia

After the horrors of the Second World War and the anti-fascist fight for freedom in the framework of the People’s liberation war in which socialist Yugoslavia was founded (1945–1991), the idea of childhood as a special stage in life played a decisive role in the reconstruction and development of post-war society at home and abroad. Children, who made up almost half of the Yugoslav post-war population, were given active social protection and were addressed socially and politically, specifically with education. At that time print was the most important medium of public communication, thus children’s magazines and literature played an important role in addressing children with the ideas that would lead to the post-war renewal of society in socialist terms and a more just global order. Hence, children’s literature provided employment opportunities for a range of cultural workers. It has also opened the doors of the art world to those to whom it had previously remained mostly closed: women and children of the broad masses. The action by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions research fellow dr. Katja Kobolt at the The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) has introduced the first systematic comparative interdisciplinary investigation into women illustrators in Yugoslav children’s literature. The action has employed a comparative approach, including all of the former Yugoslav republics and regions. It has combined approaches from literary and art history with cultural studies for novel critical insights into artistic work for children, socialist aesthetic education and subjectivation of children, especially in relation to gender. Hereby were particularly considered (i) cultural political, institutional and productional aspects and gendered dimensions of artistic labour, (ii) themes, motifs and images of childhood and gender as well as (iii) the modes and roles of artistic production, aesthetic education and cultural agency in different societal processes of fostering social and economic participation as well as active citizenship.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union