East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall
Maison Française
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), Department of Slavic Languages
In her book Forgotten Friendships: Yugoslavia and the Anticolonial Francophone World (Amherst College Press, 2025), Alexandra Perišić examines transnational friendships and alliances between intellectuals from Yugoslavia and the Francophone African and Caribbean world during the mid-twentieth century. Forgotten Friendships emphasizes the ways in which writers, intellectuals, and activists envisioned alternative futures rooted in collaboration across peripheries. Personal bonds of friendship were not mere footnotes to the anti-colonial struggle, but vital political tools for rethinking global solidarity.
Alexandra Perišić teaches at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, Serbia, where she is also the vice-dean for academic affairs. She studies how literature helps us see overlooked movements of people and ideas across places like the Balkans, the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America, focusing on South-South connections such as friendships, collaborations, and shared struggles. Her previous book, Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism and the Atlantic, examines the underlying precarity in twenty-first-century immigrant fiction and reveals the contradictions inherent in neoliberalism as an ideology.
