What remains of Yugoslavia? From the geopolitical space of Yugoslavia to the virtual space of the Web Yugosphere

Abstract

This article works from the double hypothesis that: (1) a Yugoslav socio-cultural space still exists in spite of the dissolution of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; and (2) the communities ‘occupying’ this space can be considered, in some measure, ‘diasporic’, if the ‘Yugoslav diaspora’ is defined by not only the geographic displacement of people but also by the loosening of connections between members of an ex-nation who still consider themselves a national community. The ‘space’ mapped in the article is the so-called ‘virtual space’ of the Web, including all websites that reconnect to the ‘cultural languages’ of the ‘past-country’. The author observes how these ‘different Yugoslavias’ are ‘staged’ and linked together on the Web, and verifies how some far-flung communities rally around the ‘virtual re-foundation’ and ‘virtual representations’ of Yugoslavia. The corpus is constituted mainly of ‘yugonostalgic’ websites that are subjected to a content analysis. The 191 websites of the corpus and the hypertextual map of their edges are analysed using semantic features together with other tools of categorization.