Abstract
<p>This book reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience who theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. The book chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town’s authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. It asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens’ futures and their present? The book offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people’s orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. It highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. The book assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, the book argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people’s horizons.</p>