Southward and Otherwise

Abstract

This project comes out of a conversation between Mohaiemen and Pajović, about the relative absence of Non-Aligned Movement co-founder Josip Broz Tito, from the three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017, dir: Mohaiemen). In the film, a series of conversations between Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi, Atef Berredjem, Amirul Islam, and Zonayed Saki sketch out the shadow play of warring forces inside the Non-Aligned Movement, especially around the decolonizing nations of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia that found an option to look toward an "Islamic" supra-national identity. Because of that focus, the role of Central and Eastern Europe, especially that of Yugoslavia under Tito, is absent from the film. Pajović's text re-integrates the Yugoslav bloc into Two Meetings and a Funeral. While Pajović's text concludes with a hopeful view of the potential of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mohaiemen's images and superimposed quote from Tito express an ironic doubling back. Indira Gandhi's Indian coalition of 1971, while maneuvering for Bangladesh independence from Pakistan, encountered Tito's confident comment that such problems of “tribalism” were only happening in Asia. Yugoslavia had solved the “Balkan problem”– this was spoken confidently twenty years before Tito's nation would split apart during the Yugoslav Wars. The geopolitical struggles that Tito fails to see in 1971 are harbingers for the blind spots that would cause Non-Alignment's collapse.