Catherine Verdery worried about insights from eastern Europe being transferable beyond the region the way post-colonial studies transferred beyond their origins in Southeast Asia. Insights Deana Jovanović gained in the east Serbian mining town of Bor are indeed relevant beyond eastern Europe. Staging the Promises is proof that Verdery’s worries were unfounded. The book builds on a confluence of some strong currents in post-socialist studies: attending to lived experience of contradictory temporalities as the remains of socialist “past futures” haunt the discontents with the capitalist present; the “yearnings in the meantime” (Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York, 2015) for the “normality” imagined as produced by an orderly state; and finally, minute attention to infrastructure, urban planning, or interior design, as markers of hopes and discontents with the neoliberal present.
Jovanović successfully builds upon this literature by picking Bor as her laboratory, and using “scaling of futures” as a tool for prying open her central puzzle: why when people “know” (in some sense) that their leaders’ promises are empty do they still go along anyway? Bor has grown around a copper mine, its daily schedules are ordered by the company siren, homes are heated by a single plant, and everyone breathes in the smoke that comes from the smelting complex. Socialist policies, post-socialist decline, nostalgia and hope, the return of international extractive capitalism, all have to pass through what is more or less a unitary complex.
Constantly on the verge of being” shut down,” Bor has been relentlessly staging its “Rise from the Ashes” during the 2010s, when Jovanović carried out her study, a time capsule between its near collapse in early 2000s and the acquisition of the complex by the Chinese Zijin Mining Group in 2018. Thus bounded in space and time, a small mono-industrial city suspended between the brink or ruination and suspicious hope, Bor is a place where certain processes, obviously at work in many other places, could be observed with unusual clarity. The wedge Jovanović uses to pry open the strangely productive suspicious hope she found at work in Bor is to identify “the precise constitutive elements of different types of scales of futures to which hope attached” (20).
Jovanović shows how this scaling of futures works in several domains. In Ch. 2 she attends to attitudes Bor citizens displayed towards urban refurbishment projects, such as painting dilapidated facades, or opening an “aqua park.” For people who acutely felt that “social death was lingering in the air,” the infrastructural repairs, however much they were also felt as cosmetic, temporary, partial, fake or superficial, entailed hope for something that “extended the past futures, the kinds of future imagined and promised during Bor’s Golden Age in socialism,” and thus gave a feeling that one is going forward as was necessary for people (74–75).
Chapter 3 shows how citizens of Bor bargained with the risks of a veritable “periodic table” of (toxic) elements contained in the smoke they were breathing. The “expiry date” on their fabled resilience was in the unknowable future enveloped in the fog of unreliable monitoring. As opposed to this uncertain future, the smoke signaled that the smelting is still going on and represents the “hope of not being entirely expelled from the promises of the past futures” (98). Chapter 4 explores ambivalent dealings with the derelict district heating system, while Chs. 5 and 6 treat two other modalities of “tricking” the indeterminate futures, “pretending” (to earnestly engage in handicraft training), and “accelerating” (grabbing the artificially high-salary company jobs through connections).
Through a few well-chosen arenas (infrastructure, pollution, and re-training) in the well-chosen “laboratory” of Bor, Staging Promises offers nuanced insights into the pragmatic workings of ambivalence, a way of hedging bets, seizing (short-term) opportunities, and gaining at least some agency in a situation of diminishing alternatives. Jovanović is cautious not to celebrate this limited agency prematurely. The price for it is “hijacking distant and long-term futures from people’s horizons” (193). With no alternatives in sight, the time horizon of hope contracts to the “good enough” that could be seized in the short-term. Life-projects shorten, precarity overwhelms. Theatrical performances of promising glorious futures or return to imagined past greatness (MAGA) find their fertile soil in this contraction of hope. Bor is a clear and simple example of this contraction of hopes where even promises seen as false are better than nothing, and Staging Promises extracts important insights into this predicament that are indeed applicable elsewhere. Verdery should be proud.
