Sean Homer

For the past 30 years Fredric Jameson's name has been so inextricably tied to the fate of postmodernism that his recent work on modernity and modernism has been interpreted by some critics as a " retreat " from the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory to politically regressive and imperialistic notions of modernity. For some of us, however, Jameson's recent work marks a welcome return to what he always did best, writing about modernism. The " Preface " to A Singular Modernity (2002), however, seems to exhibit a marked weariness on Jameson's part to returning once again to all those old undesirable issues that it had been " one of the great achievements of postmodernity " to have discredited (1). It is not just the renewed interest in notions of modernity in popular political and academic discourse that concerns Jameson but, I want to argue, a much older " dispute in the politics and philosophy of history. " What remains at stake for Jameson in these " undesirable " issues of modernity and modernism is the fate of socialism's emancipatory project in light of the seemingly irresistible triumph of global capital. Fredric Jameson observed more than a decade ago that we are experiencing a certain " return of the repressed " in the early twenty-first century as those previously moribund concepts of aesthetics, ethics, citizenship and civil society are once again resuscitated in academic discourse (Singular 2-3). For Jameson, at least, aesthetics as a discipline was simultaneously invented and deconstructed by modernism and should finally have been laid to rest with the emergence of postmodernity. 1 If this is, indeed, the case, then what are the implications for " Politics and/in Aesthetics " when one term out of the two is already outmoded and outdated? * Do politics disappear with aesthetics as just one more residue of modernist nostalgia? Or does the eclipse of aesthetics clear the ground for some more appropriate form of contemporary cultural politics? Certainly, for Marxism the question of aesthetics has always been a question of politics and at its most combative these questions have been fought over in relation to modernism. 2 In his 1977 " Afterword " to the volume Aesthetics and Politics, Jameson also drew our attention to a " return of the repressed, " albeit a rather different return than the one we are experiencing today: Nowhere has this return of the repressed been more dramatic than in the aesthetic conflict between 'Realism' and 'Modernism', whose navigation and renegotiation is still unavoidable for us today, even though we may feel that each position is in some sense right and yet neither is any longer wholly acceptable. (" Reflections " 196) For Jameson, at that time, it was paradoxically realism that offered the possibility of a new political aesthetic as modernism's aesthetics of fragmentation and estrangement had become irredeemably reconciled

The Macedonian filmmaker Milčo Mančevski is adamant that there is no such thing as Balkan cinema and he is not " a Balkan filmmaker ". He has repeatedly stated that his films are about people and not place, and insists that it is a fundamental mistake to read a film that is from somewhere as necessarily about somewhere. In this paper I argue, to the contrary, that Mančevski's films are deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical space. Mančevski's films range across genre, time and place, their experimental form disrupts narrative conventions and presents the past as discontinuous and open. The films engage in complicated and often indirect ways with our relationship to the past and how the past can be represented. Mančevski's films, I contend, struggle with the " founding trauma " of national identity, that is to say, with the creation of the modern Macedonian state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century and more recently the expulsion of the Slavic population from Northern Greece after the end of the Second World War. Furthermore, his films deploy elements of a national imaginary to construct a unique " timeless " and " mythical " Macedonian national identity .