Ana Ilievska Who Is Going to Save Europe? The Bid from the Semi-Peripheral Avant-Gardes

So much of European modernism and its associated avant-garde movements revolved around  one problem: the future of Europe. Between the Futurists’ rupture with the past and the modernists  balancing act between the old and the new, the peripheral European avant-gardes such as Yugoslav  Zenitism and the Portuguese writers around the Lisbon-based magazine Orpheu both put forward their 

myths and cultural heritage as a potential, revolutionary way forward. Although there is no evidence  of direct contact between Portugal and the Balkan avant-garde movements, the notion of the semi periphery (credited by Maria Irene Ramalho to Pessoa) will serve in this talk as a bridge between these  two European regions in order to understand their position towards “Europe” and their specific  proposals for its future from a comparative point of view. Neither Portugal nor the Balkans were at  the beginning of the twentieth century in the position of cultural hegemony (Gramsci), yet each put  forward their own ideas on how to supplant it through such terms as Atlantismo (Pessoa) and the  “barbarogenius” (Micić and Kosovel) against an old, syphilitic Europe. They each wrote from a  position of subalternity, spanning the geographical European South while providing a human-centered 

critique of the various hegemonic -isms and their celebratory stance on technology, a critique whose  contours are yet to be outlined in a comparative and comprehensive manner. 

Dr. Ana Ilievska is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Science and Thought at the University  of Bonn. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and has  studied and held visiting positions at Yale, Lisbon, Tübingen, and at the University of Catania in  Italy. Before coming to Bonn, she served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford  Humanities Center and Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. A  comparatist specializing in late 19th/early 20th century European literature, culture, and thought, her  teaching and research focus on humanistic concepts of technology and AI from a Southern  European/Mediterranean perspective as well as on the critical role of the humanities and academia  in the age of digital technologies. Dr. Ilievska’s publications include co-edited books, various peer reviewed articles, public scholarship, podcast appearances, and translations on Luigi Pirandello, Eça  de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, Southern European Modernism, poetry, sound studies, and the  problem of critical thinking, consciousness, and AI.