“All people are brothers, especially Africans. A long way away, in Africa, live peoples with dark skins. They greet our sailors joyfully. They point to the red star on our flag. They shake our sailors firmly by the hand and shout in their own language: Yugoslav sailors are our brothers!”
Dubraka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies.
The Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia emerged from World War II as a new and dynamic country needing infrastructure, a new government, and a new cultural imaginary sharable among the populations of its constitutive republics. Many future citizens of the federation suffered greatly during the war from fascist puppet governments, constructed externally and internally, that exacerbated regional conflicts and pitted would-be co-nationals in direct conflict with one another. In territories occupied by the Independent State of Croatia, such as in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina, non-Croats, including Jews, Serbs, and Roma were subjected to what Emily Greble describes as “a version of the Nuremberg laws” including forced police registration, job dismissals, and dress restrictions.Footnote 1 Many would be deported to concentration camps where they were worked and/or starved to death. In addition, much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed and millions of citizens killed and displaced fighting one another. Post-WWII Yugoslavia had to form a new government and create a narrative for the war and the emerging idea of “Yugoslav” that could subsume all other identities.
With the goal of creating a metanarrative of Yugoslav identity, film became a vehicle to elevate the war as a shared site of national struggle and uplift the Partisan fighters as a Yugoslav ideal.Footnote 2 Yugoslav leadership invested heavily in film based, in part, on the Leninist principle that film was the highest form of art and an effective means of spreading propaganda.Footnote 3 Early post-WWII Yugoslav films advanced the idea of harmony among the ethnically and religiously diverse Yugoslavs rooted in solidarities formed in spite of the war. In short, they called for what Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, termed “brotherhood and unity” and aimed to unite all Yugoslavs despite national or ethnic differences. Accordingly, the majority of Yugoslav films produced after the establishment of a national cinema focused on Partisan fighters. Following its decentralization in 1950, however, Yugoslav film began to incorporate cultural, political, and social themes.Footnote 4
In this article, I employ a sociohistorical approach to analyze post-WWII Yugoslav film. This analysis begins with the establishment of a viable Yugoslav film industry following WWII, it then moves to the 1970s Black Wave period when film reflected the general disillusionment with the Yugoslav project and increasing societal disaffection, and concludes in the 1980s when the period of New Yugoslav cinema emerged despite economic, political, and social challenges of the time.Footnote 5 I specifically analyze the role of physical, or epidermal, blackness in four Yugoslav films spanning the 1950s–80s and how the Yugoslav embrace of blackness provides insights into Yugoslavia’s geopolitical positionings, solidarities, and cultural imaginaries as well as how the idea of blackness in the country changed over time. Yugoslav nations have only ever had a numerically insignificant population of African-descended people, some the result of migration and others whose ancestors were east and central Africans enslaved during the Ottoman empire. Given this consistently small population, this embrace of blackness in film is curious and worthy of exploration.Footnote 6 Specific questions answered in this article include: what are the connections between Yugoslav geopolitical developments and the appearance of Black male actors and what might the incorporation of their highly visible Black bodies into Yugoslav films connote over time? To that end, I trace how blackness emerges initially in Yugoslav film as a general expression of antiracism, which, in its Yugoslav variant was an expression of anti-imperialism and support for the decolonizing world. I next address how representations of blackness eventually gain more specificity with a focus on Africa and African people as the epitome of non-alignment. I conclude with examples of how blackness came to be realized as expressions of solidarity and sameness shared between Yugoslavs and global Black populations.
This analysis begins with the 1956 Slovenian Partisan film Dolina Miru (Valley of Peace, 1956) directed by France Štiglic and the role of Jim, played by Black American-born actor John Kitzmiller, followed by the 1976 Yugoslav television film Jagoš and Ugjleša (1976) directed by Bahrudin ‘Bato’ Cengic with a specific emphasis on the role played by Afro-Albanian, or “Black” Yugoslav native, Rizo Šurla, and finally multiple roles in the 1970s and 1980s played by Kenyan Djungo Chokwe, colloquially known as Steve Hannington, and even more affectionately Stiva Šumadinac, or Steve from the heartland of Serbia. These three actors highlight the diverse origins of Africanity, or blackness in this case, in Yugoslav films.Footnote 7 Importantly, despite the different geographical and cultural origins of the actors, their visible blackness serves similar functions to highlight difference from Yugoslavs and underscore some aspect of Yugoslav geopolitical priorities.
These films also illustrate, perhaps predictably, the limited roles afforded Black women in the construction of post-war Yugoslav ideas of blackness. Unlike their mobile male counterparts, Black women were primarily viewed through an ethnographic gaze and connected to their distant origins. While it is possible to see Black women in photos and newsreels documenting Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito’s travels, Paul Betts confirms that these women appear most commonly in images with Tito’s wife Jovanka Broz serving as a “role model for African women.”Footnote 8 That Black women are not commonly included in Yugoslav cinema reinforces a masculine vision of the world advanced in film.
With this article, I aim first to expand Southeast European Studies scholarship and incorporate discussions and analyses of African and African diasporic people and communities in European spaces that are understood, approached, and analyzed primarily through their unmarked and frequently unexamined whiteness or white adjacency.Footnote 9 Secondarily, I aim to interrogate “the fact of blackness,” or visual signifiers of race, its limits, instrumentalization, and productive representational possibilities in central and southeast Europe.Footnote 10 This engagement moves beyond what Michele M. Wright terms the “Middle Passage Epistemology” that prioritizes linking Black populations primarily, if not solely, to the transatlantic slave trade to the unfortunate exclusion of members of the diaspora who do not neatly fit into that construction.Footnote 11 Moreover, I employ the term “Black” to explain its imaginings in the Yugoslav context and push for its inclusion as a productive category of analysis in studies of southeast Europe specifically and Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES) more broadly. Expanding the frames of identity and belonging in the region can have broad implications for conversations about the historical constructions of race and ethnicity in the field of SEES, which can provide useful insights for understanding their historical and contemporary use.
John Kitzmiller in The Valley of Peace (1956)
John Kitzmiller was a trailblazing African American actor, known for his roles in post-WWII neorealist Italian cinema and especially for his role as Quarrel in the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No. Kitzmiller came first to Italy as an Army captain in a segregated African American infantry. Following the war, he chose to remain in Italy instead of returning to his home of Battle Creek, Michigan.Footnote 12 Europe offered him opportunities not available in his native country, including not living as a second-class citizen, sentiment echoed by other, perhaps better known, African American artists, including Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright among many others. Tellingly, Kitzmiller never acted in the US but was followed by Black US media, and particularly in Jet magazine from 1951until his death in 1965. For example, in the 1954 Jet article “Italy’s Movie Boom for Negro Actors,” Kitzmiller is highlighted as being the first among a number of Black American actors to appear in Italian cinema. The article notes that Italy was a place where Black actors and actresses had “the biggest boom they [had] ever experienced in the motion picture industry.”Footnote 13 In American cinema, Black actors have historically been typecast into a handful of stereotypical roles categorized by Donald Bogle as “toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies & bucks,” with each role minimizing their full humanity.Footnote 14 By great contrast, Kitzmiller’s difference from the Italian majority provided a context for him to “find solidarity and even intimacy with white working-class Italians.”Footnote 15 In addition to appearing in Italian films, Kitzmiller secured other roles throughout Europe, and in 1956 he played an American GI, Jim, in the Yugoslav film Dolina Miru (The Valley of Peace). Kitzmiller’s portrayal is the earliest example of a Black person in Yugoslav film.
The Valley of Peace is a Partisan film set during WWII, but in keeping with Partisan films of the 1960s, it disrupts the genre. As Silvan Furlan argues, the film offers a “a protest against the atrocities of war” as opposed to uplifting the soldier and valor of their fight.Footnote 16 Valley of Peace recounts the story of two young children, German Lotti and Slovenian Marko, who become orphans after their parents are killed in a bomb raid. Without any actual direction or supervision, the pair set out to find the valley of peace where Lotti and Marko believe there is no war and members of their family possibly live. Lotti and Marko’s voyage is set against a path of German Nazi and Italian Fascist fighters. While traveling, they find their way into a battle between Nazis and American soldiers. An American plane is shot down and the camera moves from the plane crashing to the ground to the children attempting to cross a river as they run from German soldiers toward a parachute falling from the sky. In this scene, the music turns dramatic as the parachuting man, Jim, lands, gets up with his back to the camera, and springs into action shooting the German soldiers attempting to kill him. After Jim kills them, he runs toward the camera and is revealed to be Black. Lotti is heard crying in the background: she is on the verge of drowning and Marko cannot rescue her. Jim rushes over to Lotti, who appears to recoil from fear, picks her up into his arms, grabs Marko’s hand, and they cross the river together. Once the group finds their way to relative safety, Lotti expresses wide-eyed shock at seeing Jim. She covers and uncovers her eyes and then runs off. When Marko catches up with her, she asks if they can go. She does not like Jim. After trying to communicate with the children, Jim realizes that Lotti understands German and manages to calm her by speaking her language. Eventually, Lotti comes to trust Jim after she sees him bury a fallen American soldier he encounters along the way. Jim asks the children their names and finds out that they are headed to the valley of peace, which Marko reveals is in the same direction as the Partisans. As the trio make their way to the valley, the realities of war are always nearby. The picturesque Slovenian landscape uncharacteristically features an abandoned tank, dead bodies in a river that would otherwise provide drinking water, and abandoned villages.
When this film was shot in 1950s Yugoslavia, Jim Crow laws, segregation, red lining, and anti-miscegenation laws, among other racist and discriminatory practices, were still a daily reality for Black Americans in the US. Jim’s character becomes a symbol of the priority of European filmmakers to project significant and sustained differences between American and European attitudes toward race, and specifically against negative American attitudes, actions, punitive laws, and harsh treatment toward African Americans.Footnote 17 The film contrasts the children’s openness toward Jim with what would have been contemporary poor treatment for African Americans in the US. Lotti’s initial skepticism and apparent fear demonstrates an uneasiness with Jim’s difference, but her concern quickly diminishes after she comes to see him as simply an adult who will protect her.
Despite relying heavily on difference to highlight a relatively greater level of European humanity toward Black people, the inclusion of Jim into The Valley of Peace is interesting in a number of ways. First, blackness in the film is presented as a way to code “American,” but in its most demonstrably kind form, a feature presumably that would not be afforded to non-Black American characters. Daniel O’Brien notes that Jim “is depicted as a black man who is intelligent, skilled, professional, moral, and selfless.”Footnote 18 He is so giving that he ultimately sacrifices himself to save Lotti and Marko. He also fights alongside the Partisans against the Germans, becoming what Pavičić categorizes as an outside “arbiter” in Partisan films, verifying the valiant fight of Partisans against a powerful opponent.Footnote 19 By fighting alongside the Partisans, Jim’s outsider role fuses into one of belonging whereby Jim, effectively, becomes one of the Partisan fighters himself, illustrating the potential connections shared between Yugoslavs and their Black counterparts. Given that Black American soldiers fought in segregated units in US military branches, Jim’s ability to fight alongside the Partisans highlights the limits of his Americanness and illustrates the antiracist stance of Yugoslavia in its dealings with “the darker nations,” of which Jim is a member. This visually articulated similarity accords well with the political trajectory of the country’s leaders and their eventual goals.Footnote 20
Central to the post-WWII European imaginary is that the continent had moved beyond race.Footnote 21 In western Europe cultural theorists even pushed for new categories such as ethnicity and culture in lieu of race.Footnote 22 Racisms and prejudices persisted throughout Europe, however, and, as Alana Lentin confirms, race “remains the signifier par excellence out of which the West is imagined.”Footnote 23 In the context of west European countries, including Italy where Kitzmiller primarily worked, the mythology of raceless Europe was ironic at best and pernicious at worst, given their recent engagement with empire, colonization, racism, and social ostracism of the newly arrived so-called guest workers in post-WWII reconstruction in western Europe. By contrast, for countries under state socialism, such as Yugoslavia, post-WWII victory was two-fold: they acknowledged the existence of racism but committed to be antiracist and demonstrated their position by becoming conduits of Second World-Third World harmony.Footnote 24 From the perspective of central and east European states and their history of being colonized (most notably by the Habsburg and Ottoman empires) rather than being colonizers, provided rationale for forming these alliances in the Third World, or what we now term the Global South.Footnote 25
The film’s production year of 1956 was, interestingly, a year after the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. This conference marked an important point in forging ties between African and Asian postcolonial nations. It was the first conference of its kind to take place outside a European metropole and be restricted to postcolonial nations and their diasporic communities. Prior to this meeting in Bandung, Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito was already in search of allies because of broken ties with the Soviet Union in 1948. Tito had sought a way out of the blocism that dominated the era, and the conference at Bandung demonstrated that African and Asian nations could be reliable and powerful partners. By establishing relationships with a few leaders in African and Asian nations through travel and articulated, as well as projected, shared visions of autonomy, Tito built on the legacy of the Bandung conference and forged a path of non-alignment with decolonized nations also seeking a way to realize the power of small nations beyond the US and the Soviet Union. Tito’s imprint on deepening ties between Yugoslavia and the decolonized world is preserved in newsreel, travelogues, and numerous photos accessible via the Museum of Yugoslav History archive, featuring Tito and his wife, Jovanka, alongside African and Asian leaders and everyday people. The inevitable contrast between Tito and the leaders of these Black and brown African and Asian nations theoretically primed Yugoslav society for the eventual normalization of Black people among Yugoslavs. However, these distant frames of racial difference cemented the notion that Black bodies resided elsewhere or “far away,” to recall Ugrešić, potentially challenging any possible real inclusion for Black and Brown bodies in Yugoslavia.
The Valley of Peace premiered in 1956 to an audience of 52,030 and was shown in twenty-two different countries.Footnote 26 When it debuted, the Yugoslav film industry was new and seems to have relied at least in part on ideologies that advanced the backwardness of the US and critiqued its treatment of African Americans. Jim’s interactions with the Partisans, Lotti, and Marko present Yugoslavia as an inherently antiracist society interested in working alongside members of oppressed communities. The inclusivity of Jim’s experience explains why, when Lotti asks Jim if he would like to stay with them in the valley, Jim answers in the affirmative.
While there is not a significant collection of Yugoslav images challenging racial politics in the US, the few I have located illustrate ideological underpinnings of post-WWII state socialist countries situating themselves against capitalist systems and racial oppression inherent to western capitalism.Footnote 27 Such racial oppressions are well known and provided source material for anti-capitalist propaganda throughout the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Prior to 1948, there were some indications that Yugoslav cultural leanings directly criticized American oppression of African Americans and indigenous populations.Footnote 28 Based on the stylistic choices and themes of The Valley of Peace, it seems that the film can also be included among such critiques.
At its core, The Valley of Peace tells the story of Jim, a Black American man, traveling with two children, coded as white or unmarked, in Slovenia during WWII. In a number of scenes, Jim is carrying Lotti—the young Slovenian girl of German heritage—who represents the unmarked majority population phenotypically. He saves her from drowning, helps her to walk when she cannot steady herself, and carries her when she gets tired. Jim is clearly different from the children. However, there is no explicit discussion of his race in the film, except predictably when Nazi soldiers state that Jim is “ein Negro.” While it is minimally addressed in the film, Jim’s difference is demonstrated primarily in reference to Lotti. Despite her initial hesitancy and attempt to wipe the color from Jim’s face, the film normalizes Jim’s difference when he decides to accompany the two children to their desired destination. When Jim carves a piece of wood into a doll for Lotti and darkens its face to bear resemblance to him, Jim’s inclusion is confirmed. Lotti ultimately replaces the doll she lost during the journey with the one Jim created for her. (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Jim, Lotti, and Marko on their way to the Valley of Peace (screen grab).
This film would not have been possible in Kitzmiller’s America, where Jim Crow was the law in the South and a de facto practice in the North. The image of Jim leading two children racialized as white, and demonstrating his intellectual acumen and equality to Partisan soldiers would have ignited the ire of the US majority who feared the inclusion of Black people into their whites-only spaces.Footnote 29 Given the historical context of Cold War antagonisms, the film demonstrates the fears of Jim Crow America were not an issue for Yugoslavs. The film presumes that the Yugoslav public, to whom the film was directed, would see beyond Jim’s blackness in a way that American audiences could not. Jim’s character becomes an articulation of the priority of Yugoslav filmmakers to project significant and sustained differences between American and European attitudes and actions toward African Americans, and Black people more generally.Footnote 30 This presumed tolerance and more liberated stance toward Jim presents as progressive for the time, particularly in light of US racial politics and the country’s growing global dominance. However, Giovacchini offers a counterpoint by arguing that Jim’s association with nature and children is less about the character that he plays, and more about the characterization of Blacks, particularly embodied through the Black American actor John Kitzmiller, on screen as innocent and even animal-like, not in their aggressiveness, but because of their closeness to nature.Footnote 31
Jim and the children’s path to the Valley is only troubled because of the presence of fascist fighters that dot the landscape. Apart from these scenes, which would have been typical for the period, the journey is relatively uneventful except for one scene where a horse decides to follow Jim and the children, reinforcing Jim’s closeness to nature. The idea that a Black character is close to nature replicates sentiment typical of American films of the time, highlighting that perhaps, the antiracist posture still relied on dominant western (American) tropes. This positioning of Jim as the embodiment of a racialized type demonstrates the proclaimed antiracism of countries with state socialist systems, and was based on a particular notion of race relying on physical difference above all else.Footnote 32 While brotherhood was articulated as open and flexible, there were limits. A film like Valley of Peace helped to minimize these limits by positioning Black (male) bodies alongside Yugoslav (white) counterparts. The elastic borders of extended kinship advanced in this film reinforce what is marked and unmarked for Yugoslav society and demonstrated how early threads of Yugoslav internationalism, and its limits, were realized on screen. This internationalism positions Yugoslavia as an arbiter of east and west and a burgeoning arbiter of north and south.
Jagoš and Uglješa (1976)
Given this putative openness to Black bodies and their possible inclusion into Yugoslav space, the 1976 Sarajevo TV film Jagoš and Uglješa, translated as Jagoš and “Blackey” on some platforms, provides a reformulated take on the possible inclusion of the Black (male) body into Yugoslav society from east/south-north/west orientation. The film opens with an instrumental song by popular Yugoslav rock band “Bijelo Dugme.” Although the song is without words in the opening scenes, the lyrics assert similarities between Black and white people, “our skin is white, but the black heart is the same color.” Presumably this song references Africans and Yugoslavs and echoes cultural sentiment of the time to celebrate diversity, particularly as it can be seen in people’s colorful skin.Footnote 33 Even in its instrumental form, the song sets the tone of the film’s emphasis on the importance of skin color not as a construct but as an unimportant fact. The question is, however, what was the function of such a projection in the 1970s and how might Yugoslav realities and geopolitical positioning of the time inform the internal logic of the film? Importantly, the film uses the terms “white” and “Black” to describe Yugoslavs and African people as a point of contrast, indicating an important shift in the use of explicitly racial terminology and the ways Yugoslavs came to image themselves among European racial hierarchies as “white.”
Jagoš and Uglješa recounts the life and times of Jagoš, a white Yugoslav man, who loses his job when someone accuses him of stealing at work. He decides to travel abroad to become a guest worker, first in West Germany and then in France. The film opens with Jagoš appearing before a judge for hitting a man over the head with a bottle because he questioned the paternity of his adopted Black son, Uglješa. In this courtroom scene, Jagoš recounts his personal history, including his experiences as a guest worker and his relationship with the elder Uglješa. In these opening scenes the film confronts a number of negative features of Yugoslavia, including power structures, both in the courtroom and in Jagoš’s place of employment, and the economic hardships produced from self-managed systems that would push someone from their country and pull them to the west where there was cultural incongruency but ample employment opportunities.
Jagoš leaves Germany after getting into trouble for the assault. He moves to work in France, befriends and lives with a fellow Yugoslav. Jagoš is eventually employed on a construction site and meets a Black man, whom he calls Uglješa because he is “black as coal.” Little is revealed about Uglješa’s identity, except that he is Black, speaks French, and has ten children. In this context, Uglješa codes as “African” and presumably speaks French as a citizen of a former French colony. The two men are connected as migrant laborers, and they forge a friendship that becomes the primary focus of the film. They cannot speak each other’s languages; however, the two men find a way to communicate and become “like brothers,” to quote Jagoš, animating the logic of “brotherhood and unity.” The song that opened the film plays in a number of scenes when the two interact, reinforcing that they are closer than it appears.
The friendship comes to an abrupt and sad end when both men are injured on their work site. Jagoš has part of his leg amputated and replaced with a prosthetic. Uglješa is killed. After some time in the hospital, Jagoš is released and convinces his wife to adopt Uglješa’s youngest son, presumably assuming that it would be difficult for Uglješa’s widow to care for ten children. After the relevant paperwork is approved, Jagoš adopts Uglješa’s youngest son and brings him to Yugoslavia. The film ends with the boy, whom Jagoš also calls Uglješa, playing among children. It is unclear if they are his new brothers and sisters or just local children. The film ends with the same “Bijelo Dugme” song, revealing the underlying message of the sameness of Black Africans and white Yugoslavs. These cultural products emphasizing the sameness of Yugoslavs and global Black populations contradicted European trends to assert color-blindness as a mark of antiracism, demonstrating a divergent Yugoslav perspective on race.
This rare and endearing film addresses a number of important aspects of the mythology, as well as internal mechanisms of race and epidermal blackness in Yugoslavia at the time. The fact that the film was made for television addresses the reality of the decline in film attendance in 1970s, which Daniel Goulding attributes, in part, to the “spectacular growth and impact of television.”Footnote 34 It also reflects the reality of censorship in 1970s Yugoslavia, which limited production possibility for a number of filmmakers, including Čengić, whose now 1971 classic film adaptation of Bora Čosić’s “My Family’s Role in the Revolution” was censored in Yugoslavia.Footnote 35 Interestingly, Jagoš and Uglješa addresses several important cultural features of Yugoslavia in the 1970s including unemployment, migration, and the integration of Non-Alignment values, all of which are connected to the symbolism of Jagoš’s Black body.
The 1970s brought great change in the socialist world’s relationship with Africa, and the Non-Alignment movement changed as global interest in it declined.Footnote 36 Interestingly, however, the 1970s was the decade a number of NAM institution were created, including the Non-Aligned News Agency (1976), in which the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug had a sizable role. Perhaps the 1970s are most important to the Non-Aligned movement because Yugoslav leader Tito demonstrated his international strength through NAM in ways that he could not in Yugoslavia owing, in part, to the decentralization that accompanied changes in the 1974 Yugoslav constitution.Footnote 37
The united message undergirding non-alignment in its first decade is displayed in Jagoš and Uglješa. The film resonates with the continued importance of African people and Africa as what Nemanja Radojnić calls “the non-aligned continent,” proving Yugoslavia’s global importance.Footnote 38 The film also addresses the political and economic challenges of Yugoslavia at the time, which differed greatly from its eastern bloc neighbors because of unemployment and sanctioned migration to West Germany and France, showing not just the equality among Black and white populations but also the limited options for financial security in Yugoslavia. Both Jagoš and Uglješa have left their wives and children behind in their respective countries to find work and financial opportunities in western Europe. According to the logic of the film, Uglješa traveled to his country’s former metropole to work, while Jagoš is there because of the imbalance of those seeking employment and opportunities in Yugoslavia.Footnote 39 Yugoslavia was the only communist government that had a labor agreement with West Germany, and the year after the agreement went into effect in 1970, Yugoslavs were the largest migrant group there.Footnote 40 By 1968, there were 7,953 Yugoslav labor migrants in France, reflecting the reality that European countries preferred European labor migrants than those from the colonies.Footnote 41 Jagoš and Uglješa recounts the story of two men forced to find work abroad who become unlikely friends, which possibly resonated with tens of thousands of Yugoslavs who found themselves in similar situations. It also likely resonated with family left behind who lived on remittances. This story shines a light on the 436,000 Yugoslavs working in Germany following WWII and indirectly addresses the necessity of those funds to the Yugoslav economy.Footnote 42
Whereas the discussion of immigration and western flows of money could be viewed as a critique of socialist systems, or a “negative phenomenon,” the film also perpetuates Yugoslav openness, and even sameness, to blackness.Footnote 43 As Radonjić notes, Africa was “engraved on the Yugoslav mind” by the 1970s; the continent “was presented as the ‘closest’ continent in Yugoslavia after Europe,” and “bonds between the small, peripheral European country and the whole diverse continent were intentionally simplified so the continent became the image and projection of the Yugoslav global role.”Footnote 44 Whereas the 1970s in eastern Europe marked a period when leaders began to question their support for the Global South, Africa became synonymous with non-alignment in Yugoslavia.Footnote 45 Positioning Africa as a reliable partner-continent and the center of non-alignment persisted until Tito’s death in 1980 when Yugoslav leaders began to consider reclaiming Europeanness and realigning solidarities.Footnote 46 In Yugoslavia this late move toward Europe indicated stark differences in the priorities of blocism and non-aligned countries.
In Jagoš and Uglješa, while Jagoš would have likely been among those viewed favorably because of his whiteness, Uglješa, as a post-colonial labor migrant, would have been among those African migrants seen as undesirable and even a threat to the majority of French citizens.Footnote 47 The logic of the film demonstrates, however, that these two men have much more in common than the viewer may realize, at least in the cultural imaginary of sameness uplifted in Yugoslavia at the time. Given that Yugoslavia’s global importance was rooted in its relationship with Africa, reasserting the country’s connection with the continent and African people was simultaneously a reaffirmation of sameness and a way to assert its importance beyond Europe, but perhaps also a way to highlight that the similarities went beyond political positionings.
Striking and superficially apparent is that Rizo Šurla, the actor who plays Uglješa, is indeed Black, and of African heritage. What is not well known is that he was a Yugoslav born and raised in Montenegro. He even fought as a Partisan in WWII.Footnote 48 Šurla was the child of a slave, and according to historian Paula Royster, possibly a slave himself.Footnote 49 Jagoš and Uglješa stresses the similarities of Yugoslavs and Black people—specifically Africans—and the similarities of humans irrespective of cultural origins. It is offered clearly and directly in the film and reinforced by the “Bijelo Dugme” song. However, when considering that Uglješa was actually a Montenegrin actor speaking broken French, the question of local notions of identity existing beyond unmarked categories, and the general solidarity of Yugoslavs to their Black and Brown brothers becomes complicated and difficult to understand, especially because Šurla was a Black Yugoslav. As a state with a local, formally enslaved Black population, Yugoslavia was historically intimately entangled with the local politics of racial capitalism and racial hierarchies that resulted from the historical instrumentalization of these differences, especially in their development through time.Footnote 50 Yugoslavia was uniquely situated to advance harmony and solidarity among Black populations both in the Third World and at home. However, little is known about the Afro-Albanian population in Montenegro and their position vis-à-vis the transnational racial harmony promoted in these films.
Questions and internal notions of difference—either ethnic or racial in nature—are included in the film, but primarily as a rebuke to those that would not consider Jagoš’s adopted son as Yugoslavia’s own. This constructed family conveys the image of Madeline Hirsch’s “ideal family,” that is inclusive of races and cultures.Footnote 51 The message of the film is second-third world similarity, by way of Yugoslavs and Africans, but ignores actual Yugoslav demographics of which Šurla was part. Perhaps this was unintentional, but it would be an interesting counterfactual to consider if Jagoš would have met Uglješa in France as just another Yugoslav guest worker. That was not, however, in keeping with the Yugoslav image of the time when the logic focused on creating and maintaining racial solidarity among international parties, particularly in the Third World, and not so much internally among the various racial others of Yugoslavia like Roma or mixed heritage individuals. Of course, that is because these internal solidarities prioritized class, which would theoretically render race irrelevant. However, the film demonstrates the pitfalls of examining difference solely on the basis of class in situations where race, or epidermal/physical Blackness, affects interactions. Though race and class frequently intersect, class is something that can be changed while an individual’s race cannot, particularly when the primary indicator is visible. Uglješa, like Jim, is firmly a member of the working class. Both Jim and Uglješa are marked most notably by their physical difference, however, highlighting that their blackness, and not their class, was the primary feature defining them, and it was central to the roles in both films.
Jagoš and Uglješa has two additional Black characters, the man who represents Ugleša’s embassy—a country that is never clearly articulated—and the boy who plays Uglješa’s son. The boy is listed in the opening credits as “Eto.” Eto speaks directly to the camera at the end of the film, saying that he loves his new family, he writes his old family regularly, and that he has grown to be taller than his dad Jagoš’s wooden leg.
Through Eto’s inclusion, the film demonstrates that children were the future bearers of non-alignment and Yugoslavia. This position crafted for children is consistent with the mission of the Young Pioneers organization and lessons from textbooks. As Sanja Radak describes, children’s print media upheld the ideology of non-alignment, including its opposition to racism and colonialism.Footnote 52 As such, the openness to racial difference demonstrated in the films necessarily included racial tolerance as a feature of youth and Yugoslav Non-Aligned internationalism generally. Because there is a complicated interplay between Šurla’s biography and his role in the film, however, the openness to Others seems accessible only to those who come from the outside. While this film offers a nuanced depiction of Yugoslav international solidarities, it perpetuates the idea of providing Yugoslav help to Africa—specifically through adoption. The film leaves unclear why it was necessary for Uglješa’s son to leave his home. Both Uglješa and his son serve as devices to illustrate how open and accepting Yugoslav society is, but the film ultimately affirms the superiority of one group and employs one of the most enduring stereotypes that characterizes Africa and Africans as inherently in need of aid.
In Jagoš and Uglješa and The Valley of Peace, the Black actors have similar roles. The protagonists’ Black bodies are inflected as sites of difference to underscore that Yugoslavia stands waiting to accept and include those whom western society has cast aside and deemed unequal. In The Valley of Peace, the foreignness of Jim’s body and his actual origin of birth offer a sign that renders a backstory or description of who or whose he is unnecessary. This is particularly true given the historical setting of the Civil Rights movement in the US and the role of European socialist countries in highlighting American racial hypocrisy.Footnote 53 With Uglješa, however, it is necessary to explain, even if it is in limited terms, who and whose he is because, when the film premiered, the symbol of “Black” as “African” was a powerful signifier to demonstrate Yugoslavia’s global importance but also the country’s problems that moved it closer to an Africa imaginary. “Black” as a symbol could simultaneously highlight societal problems by positioning a Black man coded as African and a white Yugoslav man equally in need of help from the west.
Yugoslav connections to African nations in the 1970s were realized through shared membership in the Nonaligned Movement and they were solidified through various infrastructure projects, trade agreements, and outreach projects such as student mobility schemes.Footnote 54 Jagoš and Uglješa taps into the relevant currents of the time and maps the importance of the Yugoslav relationship to the African continent, and the link between Africans and Yugoslavs on to the relationship between Jagoš and Uglješa. Also important, and not entirely irrelevant to this discussion, is that it positions Yugoslavs as Europe’s Others by way of migration and therefore links the Yugoslav migration experience to other so-called guest workers who migrated to western Europe. Through comparing the 1956 and 1976 films, it is possible to track similar uses of blackness as a promotion of solidarity and sameness. However, the goals and possible impact diverge greatly. Whereas The Valley of Peace establishes the homeland as a site of conflict and possible place to neutralize differences, Jagoš and Ugleša broadens parameters and realigns solidarities to have local and international dimensions, all while questioning the position of Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs within the dividing lines of east-west.
Beyond The Valley of Peace and Jagoš and Ugleša, films with actors coded as Black surface in only a few other categories, and the role assigned to Black individuals in these films reflect their position(s) in Yugoslav society as outsiders. They are a part of the “family,” but as temporary members. Black people in these examples of Yugoslav cinema were always from somewhere else and would, presumably, return. Yugoslav films from the 1970s and 80s with Black characters feature an expansion of the defining facets of Yugoslav identity. In these films Black bodies highlight Yugoslav connections to the world by way of their outside origins and reaffirm Yugoslav priorities during a time of great change and political instability. In the two films Tit for Tat (1978) and A Great Guy at Heart (1981), Steve Hannington plays an international student. Hannington is a Kenyan man who came to Yugoslavia as a high school student and left when the wars started in the 1990s, but returned in the early 2010s because he felt like he was a “Yugoslav.”Footnote 55 He remains well known in the former Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, primarily for his music and for acting in a commercial for the Yugoslav department store Kluz, but also because he chose to return and maintained a residence there until 2023.
Tit for Tat (1978) and A Great Guy at Heart (1981)
The two roles that Hannington plays in these films are not connected to each other, rather, his recurrence in a similar role suggests how commonplace it was for international students of color, particularly from non-aligned countries, to study in Yugoslav universities in the 1970s and 1980s at least until the expense was too great for the Yugoslav republics to bear.Footnote 56 In both films Hannington plays a student: in one film he is a medical student, and in the other, he is just a university student. In both films he does the same things that the other, presumably Yugoslav (that is, white) students did, including answering questions, being tardy to class, and, in his role as a medical student, commenting on the conditions of the various patients while doing rounds in a hospital. Because this role is common and familiar, there is no need to comment on the differences in his student roles, with which by the 1970s the vast majority of city-dwelling Yugoslavs would have been familiar. Hannington’s roles advance the notion that Black people were just a part of Yugoslav society, albeit temporary, and that even though their melanin rendered them physically different than Yugoslavs, they were otherwise no different than their white Yugoslav counterparts, sentiment similarly reflected in the “Bijelo Dugme” song referenced above.
Although Hannington acted in these roles, his position in Yugoslavia was much more significant. As mentioned above, he was not only an actor, but also a pop singer and performer in the 1970s–80s. Hannington’s blackness was connected to the global rise of American 1970s Black cool, and African American diasporic hegemony, realized in physical, visual, and sonic forms.Footnote 57 As Catherine Baker notes, Hannington’s cool “condensed Africanity into African-Americanness.”Footnote 58 In the context of the Cold War, everything inside of communist societies was imagined as static and antithetical to progress, and all connected to the west, and the US in particular, as representing progress, vibrancy, and desirability. By the 1970s, the US was on the verge of winning the Cold War, de jure segregation laws and other aspects of Jim Crow were legally defeated in the United States, and African American culture, which was simultaneously associated with protest and rebellion by way of the Civil Rights movement, helped to elevate Black American culture, which had long been a part of American cultural diplomacy. As Lisa Davenport highlights, “jazz as an instrument of global diplomacy” showcased Black musical culture around the world to illustrate that it was integral to American culture.Footnote 59
In Yugoslavia, jazz was popular even before the Cold War. It helped shape popular Yugoslav music culture right alongside American literature, films, and television culture.Footnote 60 However, the import of American jazz contributed to what had already existed and been popularized throughout the country and other communist countries, in part because Yugoslavia had its own jazz bands and musicians that it exported to Soviet-aligned east European nations as an exercise of its own soft power.Footnote 61 American jazz diplomacy, together with jazz concerts and festivals in the 1960s, saw the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong among others performing in Belgrade. Their performances helped to define Black music as an aspect of American cool culture.
Failures of the Civil Rights movement in the US gave rise to the Black Panther Party, and its key figures, most notably Angela Davis, became cultural icons in their own right throughout countries in the eastern Europe. In fact, throughout the eastern bloc and Soviet Union, letter campaigns imploring that Angela Davis be released from prison were effective in proving the continued entanglement of American capitalism and racial inequalities.Footnote 62 While I have found no traces of any similar letter campaigns in Yugoslavia, likely because of positive relations with the US, the influence of events in neighboring countries was surely felt. Moreover, US involvement in Vietnam and the assassination of Martin Luther King was met with protest and solidarity movements.Footnote 63
African American culture, despite its distance from Yugoslavia, was connected to that culture of protest and became associated with “cool” through highly visible African American cultural products. Early forms of African American diasporic hegemony, and the iconic status of Black American musicians, offer a rationale for why someone with no connections to these African American artforms could be presumed to be tied to them. Moreover, the rise in Africanity conflated with African Americanness also came after decades of consistent appreciation of American pop culture with particular emphasis on American music, especially African American music, leading to an increased interest in African and African American culture.Footnote 64 Despite the popularity of Yugoslav cultural products, American cultural products were aspirational and uplifted in the country as a result.Footnote 65 This helped to cement the connection between certain music forms and African Americans and, arguably, make connections between Black American cultural products, Black American cool, and Black people more broadly. This form of soft power, realized through cultural products, has roots in 1969 Yugoslavia and was instrumental to Americanization.Footnote 66 Because Yugoslavia and the US maintained relatively close relations in the years following the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the impact and influence of Black American culture, by way of music and other cultural figures, left a deep impact on the society still visible today.
It is possible to view aspects of mimicry and appropriation of Black American musical forms by white Americans and Europeans as early as the 1950s. This phenomenon exists to this day but with broader, global implications. Given the connection between blackness, Black skin, African, and African American musical forms, it is no surprise that someone such as Steve Hannington’s version of cool became popular in a society already attuned to sonic Blackness, or the sound of Black American music. However, embedded within Hannington’s music are facets of his Kenyan heritage and Kenyan music forms, such that his image as Black man is complicated and reflects the desire that Yugoslavs had in projecting a kinship, or brotherhood, with someone like him.
Hannington’s work represents an extension of the interest in African and African American cultures, which Vuletić argues was perceived as a foreign policy issue rather than a domestic one.Footnote 67 This, of course, presupposed that race, or hierarchical structures akin to race, did not exist in the country. Steve Hannington, like Rizo Šurla before him, and John Kitzmiller before him, helped to ease Yugoslavs into an openness and comfort with Black bodies until they were viewed as simply a part of the cultural landscape, confirming Yugoslavia’s connection to the world. However, in this positioning, they were always viewed as outsiders with temporary ties to Yugoslavia and therefore impermanent residents. They nod toward a particular political posture and future cultural imaginary that incorporates external Black men but remains challenging to those local “Black” populations who have a deep history in the region and, when considered among Yugoslav composition, complicate local cultural, ethnic, and racial matrices and corresponding hierarchies of power, belonging, and difference.
Conclusion, or Considering the Broader Implications of These Films
Consistent in these four films from three different decades is a desire to project an image of Yugoslavia as an antiracist space first as a reaction against Cold War antagonisms and then as leaders of the Non-Aligned movement, demonstrating solidarity with the Third World through shared, or similar, experiences. Race was a matter of foreign policy in Yugoslavia that influenced and created pathways for interracial and Second-Third World solidarities. To demonstrate its global importance, Yugoslavs needed to model inclusivity and did so by way of one of its most important cultural products: film. While superficially demonstrating the promise of the Yugoslav brand of socialism, this image of the Black body as foreign “Other,” presents a country consistently positioning the question of race as an external marked category and therefore failing to confront and/or recognize its own internal racial hierarchies in similarly important ways. There is a great deal expressed in what is absent from these films, including Black women, non-Black African international students who also studied in Yugoslavia, and members of other local racialized communities, including Roma, who have long been affected by their social marginalization. The overreliance on physical or epidermal blackness perpetuates race, and even blackness, as one thing—a feature of marked bodies and not an aspect of Yugoslavia’s deep history of race signifying difference of an ethnic nature.Footnote 68 Finally, the underlying assumption of these films renders the mythology of race as solely a pre-WWII phenomenon false, and the claims of “white innocence,” that followed contradictory.Footnote 69 In these films blackness is consistently tied to a body racialized as Black and external to the Yugoslav cultural and racial matrix. Given this uncritical stance, rather than objectively advancing Yugoslavia as antiracist and open to the incorporation of Black (male) bodies, these films present the possibility of inclusiveness, but ultimately cement Yugoslav cultural/racial identity as unmarked and therefore only inclusive of its majority, both in terms of their power, but also in reference to the white skin that contrasts so clearly with those Black men cast based on their epidermal difference, or blackness.
Sunnie Rucker-Chang is the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Culture, Associate Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, and Interim Chair of African and African American Studies at the Ohio State University. She works, writes, and researches on the social construction of race and culture as it relates to privileged and marginalized communities in Europe, especially central and southeast Europe. In her research, Rucker-Chang focuses on how literature and film contribute to culture and nationalist identities, in the creation and maintenance of racialized communities in southeast Europe and how the demographics of a field can affect pedagogy and community participation. Her research and projects have been funded by the American Association of University Women, American Councils, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The US National Security Agency, Taft Research Center, University Research Council, and US Russia Foundation.
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