Across post-Yugoslav cities, self-organised choirs have, over the past two decades, revitalised anti-fascist, workers’ and revolutionary songs—as an intervention in the neoliberal present, marked by the rise of right-wing politics, nationalism and xenophobia, and the ongoing privatisation of previously socially owned resources and infrastructure. In this talk, grounded in my book Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (OUP, 2025), I argue that the activities of these collectives raise broader questions about the potentials and limits of music and sound for new forms of organisation today.

At the centre of my talk is strategic amateurism: the deliberate embrace of non-professional, everyday artistic engagement—as a political tactic—to resist the capture of musical activities by market flows. While addressing the contemporary moment, this framework reclaims the socialist legacies of common cultural infrastructures that were once essential to building social formations beyond privatised, profit-oriented and consumerist modes of living. I discuss choirs’ attempts at radical democratisation of access to musical activities—under the phrase “anyone can sing”—as a form of organisation that speaks not only to open participation but also to the legacies of the socialisation of the means of musical production, as an important way of thinking about music and sound politics today.

Full description and details of the book are available here.

Speaker's info:

Ana Hofman is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). Her work centres on music, sound, and politics in socialist and postsocialist societies, with a regional focus on the former Yugoslavia and thematic emphases on memory, affect, and activism in the current conjuncture of neoliberalism and postsocialism. She has published numerous articles and book chapters; her monographs include Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (2011) and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (2015), which examines contemporary musical recuperations of the Yugoslav antifascist resistance of World War II. She co-edited (with Federico Spinetti and Monika E. Schoop) the 2020 special issue of Popular Music and Society, “Music and the Politics of Memory: Resounding Antifascism across Borders,” and (with Tanja Petrović) the volume Affect’s Social Lives: Post-Yugoslav Reflections (2023). Her latest book, Socialism Now: Singing Activism after Yugoslavia (Oxford University Press, 2025), explores strategic amateurism, the politics of leisure, and the musical afterlives of socialism in the region.