Forgotten Friendships: Yugoslavia And The Anticolonial Francophone World
 

Forgotten Friendships: Yugoslavia and the Anticolonial Francophone World examines transnational friendships and alliances between intellectuals from Yugoslavia and the Francophone African and Caribbean world during the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that transnational political friendships helped shape major intellectual movements like Négritude, African socialism, and global socialist feminisms, which surged beyond national, regional, and even diasporic spaces. Blending archival research, literary analysis, and biography, the book fills a significant gap in our understanding of how intellectuals from the Global South and the socialist world collaborated on shared goals of decolonization, anti-racism, and socialist worldmaking.
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.
"Forgotten Friendships is a critical contribution to the understanding of the many intertextual and ideological networks that are at work in the making of global Francophone African and Caribbean Studies. Within the field of Francophone studies, this book is both necessary and groundbreaking. At a time when the digital has brought about an unprecedented globalization of the world, Forgotten Friendships reminds the student of Francophone literatures and cultural studies of some critical, if understudied, genealogies of the Global South."
-Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester
"This is a brilliant book, at times breathtakingly beautiful in its careful interweaving of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, and the possibilities, as well as the difficulties, of relating across difference. By peopling the story of Yugoslavia's non-aligned commitment to the decolonial struggle, it forms a missing link between a 'top down' and a 'bottom up' approach to circuits of decolonial solidarity and non-alignment, reminding us of the artificiality of the distinction. The framing idea of friendship as both subject and method works perfectly."
-Paul Stubbs, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb