PART III: YUGOSLAVIA FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (1918–1991) - Ways of Remembering Yugoslavia: The Yugoslav Rear-View Mirror
PART III: YUGOSLAVIA FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (1918–1991) - Ways of Remembering Yugoslavia: The Yugoslav Rear-View Mirror

Author(s): Mitja Velikonja
Subject(s): Cultural history, Social history, Recent History (1900 till today)
Published by: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji
Summary/Abstract: In the following text I’ll try to do the impossible: review Yugoslavia from the perspective of “memory studies” – currently a very invigorating interdisciplinary branch at the productive intersection of historical anthropology, the sociology of time, cultural studies and transition studies. Already at the outset, one encounters a series of problems. Namely, which Yugoslavia to review? The Yugoslavia from the time of the Karađorđević dynasty (1918–1941)? Tito’s (1945–1991) or Milosevi ’s (1992–2006) Yugoslavia? Should all three be reviewed at once? What kind of memory will be considered: collective or personal? Cultural or political? Or memory based on memoirs – that much-loved but factually unreliable literary form? Will the subject-matter be based on offcial, that is, institutionalized memory, or unoffcial, minority memory: established or subversive? Oral, written, recorded, engraved in monuments and memorials, or memory on the Internet, in the social media? Memory from first-hand or second-hand accounts or those passed-on, retrieved, “inherited”? And should these include the subjects of nostalgia and anti-nostalgia, bitter-sweet, heavy and traumatic memories? Retro and reproductive cultures, which in current cultural forms elicit traces of memory of previous times? Spontaneous amnesia or its opposite – contrived and systematic amnesia? Memories as a means of emancipation?

• Details
• Contents