“Miss Sarajevo” and Spivak
Review of the war documentary "Miss Sarajevo" and how it overcomes the limit of the subaltern.
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Review of the war documentary "Miss Sarajevo" and how it overcomes the limit of the subaltern.
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Review of the war documentary "Miss Sarajevo" and how it overcomes the limit of the subaltern.
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Review of: Regina Fritz: Nach Krieg und Judenmord. Ungarns Geschichtspolitik seit 1944. (Diktaturen und ihre Überwindung im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, Bd. 7.) Wallstein. Göttingen 2012. 368 S. ISBN 978-3-8353-1058-2. (€ 34,90.). Reviewed by Árpád v. Klimó.
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An interview with Cezary Obracht-Prądzyński, sociologist and professor at Gdańsk University. Interviewer: Piotr Leszczyński
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Der Fokus dieses Artikels liegt auf der Bedeutung der Pogrome von 1918/1919 für die Erinnerung osteuropäischer Juden an den Ersten Weltkrieg und die rückblickende Wahrnehmung der verschiedenen Besatzungsmächte. Exemplarisch wird dabei vor allem auf die Pogrome von Krakau, Lemberg und Pinsk eingegangen. In einem Ausblick geht es zudem um die durch diese Erfahrungen veränderte gegenseitige Wahrnehmung von Juden und Deutschen während des 2. Weltkriegs.
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The text discusses some of the contemporary issues of erecting public sculptures and monuments in Slovenia. It focuses on the Monument to the Victims of All Wars, unveiled in the centre of Ljubljana in the summer of 2017. The monument and the events surrounding it are presented as an example of a predicament in which the inappropriate behaviour of the different stakeholders in the long-term process of monument creation produces numerous social disagreements and ultimately results in a problematic monument. The article problematises the historical revisionism regarding World War II, which manifests itself in the monument and through the processes associated with it. It examines how and why such a large state monument can be created regardless of the absence of a professional consensus that monuments actually have a therapeutic effect on traumatised and post-conflict societies. Furthermore, there is also no consensus that Slovenians are currently such a society at all. The monument is often referred to as a tribute to reconciliation, although there is also no consensus about the necessity for reconciliation, let alone about what such reconciliation may actually mean and what its elements should be.
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Review of: Anna Witeska - Młynarczyk, Evoking Polish Memory. State, Self and the Communist Past in Transition, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2014, ss. 253, ISBN: 978-3-631-64163-7. Review by: Izabella Main
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Review of: Patrycja Trzeszczyńska, Łemkowszczyzna zapamiętana. Opowieści o przeszłości i przestrzeni, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 2013, ss. 446, ISBN: 978-83-233-3487-3. Review by: Anna Szyfer
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The article is an analysis of the regulations regarding the reduction of pensions of former officers of the People’s Republic of Poland’s security services as an element of state politics of memory, presenting the Uniformed Services Pension Amendment Acts of 2009 and 2016 from the perspective of transitional justice.Whilst investigating the admissibility of using such a retribution mechanism, the author draws attention to the purpose of this type of regulation. Reducing pensions has, in fact, two goals – a retrospective one and a prospective one. The retrospective goal is about administering historical justice by penalizing a specific group of people using various mechanisms (in this case administrative sanctions). In the prospective aspect, it is an element of institutionalizing memory and building a specific political narrative. As a consequence, apart from commemorative practices, it aims to produce and disseminate knowledge in public space, while clearly rejecting the past regime.In relation to the Uniformed Services Pension Amendment Acts, while the Act of 2009 was to some extent aimed at the retrospective goal, the 2016 Act is primarily an element of politics of memory used by authorities to control the recollection of past events by explicitly condemning the previous system and all persons in any way related to it. For this reason, the author focuses on the mechanism of reducing pensions as one of the elements of politics of memory in Poland.
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Constructing collective identity is one of the most crucial challenge for political power which seek legitimization. Pursuing such aim political actors choose different tools due to theirs ideological affiliation and political roots. One may observe in local Poland that depoliticization process play its role. This have a great impact on local communities. That is why local political elites make barriers for disputing history by using two techniques: presentism (is the view that neither the future nor the past exist – past times must meet present political requirements) and recentivism (only present time exist). Such practice of political power makes barriers for consolidation of democracy.
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In Poland during the communist period and until 1989, it was nearly impossible to openly talk about the Second World War. First, due to friendship with the Soviet Union and later, after the fall of communism, Poland was busy creating its own government, introducing the democratic culture and fighting with an economic crisis in order to transform the country it became between 1989 and 2000. After this period, history and commemoration events started to play a very important role for the national and political identity of the country. Like in other Central and Eastern European states, Poland is an example of how history is used as a political tool in the museum narratives and exhibition forms, which also trigger conflicts.
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This article aims to present the songs and activity of Tomáš Hnídek and their reception among extreme right-wing sympathisers in the Czech Republic over the last decade. The study analyses the use of selected elements of collective imagery related to the singer-songwriter convention, with particular reference to the figure of Karel Kryl. It also draws attention to persuasive techniques of creating an image and to their influence on the reception of the singer-songwriter genre in the context of hate speech and struggle over a new politics of memory in the Czech Republic, pursued by extreme right-wing politicians and their followers.
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The article is an attempt to combine in one reflection the elements of two directions of critical thinking: discursive and performative. The starting point of the analysis is the assumption (derived from beliefs common in pre-performative times) that every space (including a city’s territory) can be treated as a text. This means that both static artifacts and activities in a given space communicate a certain message and can be seen as signs or symbols that refer to something outside of them. Our reflection focuses on practices in which the performative potential is fully revealed and which can be interpreted as a kind of rebellion against the present reality and official policies of memory. The analyzed activities are understood here as symbolic and cultural practices and aim to introduce changes on several levels: to change the historical consciousness of community members; to affect the nuances and expansion of national memory (in this case Serbian or Croatian); to modify the nature of memory. We are interested in interventions that are usually undertaken by persons or groups located on the outskirts of the system of power.
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This study discusses the first of a series of topics that I believe are relevant to the recent developments in the Romanian-Hungarian relationship. The background for the Romanian-Hungarian relationship has changed profoundly in the last few years. The factors that sparked these changes include the fact that many Romanians of Hungarian ethnicity have obtained the Hungarian citizenship, the increase in Hungarian investment in Transylvania, the influence of FIDESZ among Hungarian ethnics, the alienation of the Hungarian community in Romania along an increase in its contacts with Hungary and, at the same time, its emancipation from the Romanian state. Few investigations have looked at these topics. The many, mostly ideological, texts written on the occasion of the two centennials, of the Great Unification and the Trianon Treaty, cannot take the place of the research that needs to inform adequate policies towards the new reality of the Romanian-Hungarian relationship. The paradigm of the “Romanian-Hungarian reconciliation” that dominated the '90s and the beginning of the '2000s seems obsolete. This first part of the study is an introduction to the issue of “the missing research”. My analysis looks at the relevant actors, decision-makers and those influential in forming public opinion, that affect the relationship Romania has with its Hungarian minority and with Hungary.
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This article explores ways in which Habsburg nostalgia has become an important factor in contemporary place-making strategies in the city of Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine. Through the analysis of diasporic homecomings, city center revitalization, and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the politics of monuments, I explore hybrid and diverse ways in which Habsburg nostalgia operates in a given setting. Rather than a static and homogenous form of place attachment, in Chernivtsi different cultural practices associated with Habsburg nostalgia coexist with each other and depending on the political context as well as the social position of the “nostalgic agents” manifest themselves differently. Drawing from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that in order to fully understand individuals’ attachment to space, it is necessary to grasp both the subtle emotional ways in which the city is experienced by individuals as well as problematize the role of the built environment in the visualization of collective memory and emotions of particular groups. The focus on changing manifestations of the Habsburg nostalgia can bring then a better understanding of the range and scope of the city’s symbolic resources that might be mobilized for various purposes.
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The article traces certain mnemonic patterns in the ways individuals who belonged to the late-socialist Yugoslav youth elite articulated their values in the wake of Yugoslavia’s demise and the ways they make sense of the Yugoslav socialist past and their generational role a quarter of a century later. It detects narratives of loss, betrayed hopes, and a general disillusionment with politics and the state of post-socialist democracy that appear to be particularly frequent in the testimonies of the media and cultural elites. They convey a sense of discontent with the state of post-Yugoslav democracy and with the politicians—some belonging to the same generation—who embraced conservative values and a semi-authoritarian political culture. The article argues that an emerging new authoritarianism and the very process of progressive disillusionment with postsocialist politics allowed for the emergence and articulation of such alternative, noninstitutionalized individual memories that, whilst not uncritical of the Yugoslav past, tend to highlight its positive aspects.
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The article presents the findings of research carried out in Palestine with the use of the tools of visual anthropology. The analysis demonstrates the potential of the application of the concepts of “the third generation” and “post-memory” to describe the experience of young Palestinian women. The argument focuses upon the strategies resorted to by women who, in the course of the study, agreed to present the key values that they profess, and consented to share them publicly in the form of a photo-interview. Their narratives are presented in the context of the reinterpretation of the events of the Nakba.
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The Warsaw Rising Museum (WRM), opened in Warsaw in 2004 to commemorate the 1944 rebellion by Polish citizen-soldiers against Nazi occupiers, is considered the first modern historical museum in Poland. During the ten years since its opening, it has had a significant influence not only on public imaginations of the Rising but also subsequent museum trends in Poland. Using Anna Wieczorkiewicz’s concept of the “museal game” in which meaning is produced jointly by the museum institution and its visitors, we address the following questions: what meanings does the WRM have for its various audiences, and how has it come to have these meanings? Drawing on analysis of the museum’s founding documents and press coverage of the museum, interviews with visitors, and a review of scholarly literature, we seek to understand the universe of meanings within which the WRM has become a sociocultural phenomenon. We argue that the strategies employed by the museum encompass interconnected political and poetical dimensions. Specifically, we discuss how the museum attempts to foster Polish national identity by evoking personal identification among visitors by appealing to their emotions. We examine the range of meanings the WRM has been given by various participants in the museal game—museum originators, “public voices” including scholars and journalists, visitors, and ourselves as researchers. In doing so, we give special attention to the notion of nostalgia—how it has been operationalized by the museum planners, and how it is received by the audience, in the service of promoting personal and emotional identification.
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This article investigates the developments of public memory of the First World War as it is written into the national narratives of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia on the way to the centennial of the war’s outbreak. The First World War constitutes both a shared and a divided memory in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Though the war was a catastrophe everywhere, to Serbia it also became a triumph on the allied side, whereas in Bosnia and Croatia it was mainly a state collapse. Yet, the First World War also provided the immediate conditions for the creation of the first Yugoslav state, and consequently the history of the war was narrated within a Yugoslav context, echoing the triumphant Serbian narrative. With the fall of socialist Yugoslavia, the memory of the First World War developed quite differently in the three states. Different lessons are being drawn from war history, often with the aim of situating the nation within a European context. In Serbia, First World War narratives remain national and heroic and are framed as a virtuous, pro-democratic, and European legacy. In Croatia and Bosnia, First World War history is being created anew and, at least in the Bosnian case, with an aspiration to present Bosnia’s war experience within a discourse of European reconciliation. Based on analyses of popular history books, history debates in newspapers and media, and political commentary, the article shows how the First World War as public memory has moved from Yugoslav to national narratives with an increasingly European aspiration.
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Drawing upon developments in cultural and social memory studies and Europeanization theory, this article examines the Europeanization of Holocaust memory understood as the process of construction, institutionalization, and diffusion of beliefs regarding the Holocaust and norms and rules regarding Holocaust remembrance and education at a transnational, European level since the 1990s and their incorporation in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe, which is also the area where the Holocaust largely took place. The article identifies the transnational agents of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory—the European Union’s parliament, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, as well as the United Nations. It analyzes chronologically the key Holocaust-related activities and documents of these agents, highlighting East European countries’ varied and changing position towards them. It examines synchronically the outcome of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory by these transnational agents—a European memory of the Holocaust—identifying its key components, discussing the main aspects, and illustrating the impact of this process and outcome upon the memory of the Holocaust in the East European countries. The article argues that the Europeanization of Holocaust memory has significantly contributed to the development of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe, although other agents and processes were also involved.
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