Popkulturowe wojny na noże i widelce – deskrypcja współczesnego serbskiego i chorwackiego gastronacjonalizmu

The aim of the text is to demonstrate the unusual vitality of the nationalist discourse of today’s Croatia and Serbia, which explicitly draws on the nationalism of the 1990s that marked the beginning of the new nation states established after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Despite the passage of time, the trite nationalism, i.e. the one visible in the pop-culture, remains a major element of the political life and a guarantor of the state which can be called after Danilo Kiš a state of deep nationalist paranoia. The reflection has been inspired by the current political events, concentrated around the seemingly innocent elements of the pop culture (cuisine), which constitute a telling litmus paper of both the transitions that took place in the face of intensification of the war-induced identity-related discourse, as part of which the various canons of national cultures were reinterpreted, and of the contemporary Serbian and Croatian acts of “pop-cultural knife and fork wars”. The text constitutes an attempt to describe the post-Yugoslav “nationalist menu”, it contains various cultural texts, the selection of which shows the complexity of the problem.