| Popis: |
This paper examines the emergence of and the complex relationship between the idealized figure of Yugoslav socialist youth and the westernized figure of the audience of popular culture so as to provoke a re-evaluation of the “exceptionality” of the Yugoslav field of popular culture. In order to do so, the first part focuses on the emergence of the figure of youth at an intersection of legal, academic and cultural discourses and emphasizes the fact that, since it was entrusted with the symbolic role of the subject expected to carry out the socialist project, this figure came to exist in a state of constant tension between portrayals celebrating it as the signifier of a healthy nation on its way to a socialist future and panicked cries calling for it to be provided with persistent guidance, lest it go astray, which came to pervade the discourses framing the production and reception of popular culture where youth was concerned. The second part then draws attention to the ways these discourses inflect the representations of youth and the audience of popular culture in the Croatian youth magazine Plavi vjesnik, as well as the ways they are negotiated, allowing us to observe a gradual shift from evocations of dominant socialist values aimed at producing an idealized figure of youth to which readers should aspire, shunning popular culture, through the emergence of positive representations of the audience of popular culture, which continue to be articulated with reference to the idealized figure of socialist youth, to the establishment of a value system inherent to the field of popular culture, more similar to its Western counterpart than it is typically assumed. |
