Who Needs Identity? Transnational Subjects & Historical Knowledge (original) (raw)
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The use and misuse of textbooks by ethnic entrepreneurs in the lead up to and following the wars of the 1990s in the Western Balkans has been extensively documented by the literature. In this chapter, we examine the main trends and changes to history textbooks in the post-Yugoslav countries over the past several decades. Despite the fact that the overt nationalist propaganda of the 1990s has been mostly removed from textbooks across the region, they are still wrought with messages specifying who belongs to "us" and who is the Other, heavily employ victimisation narratives, and interpret events exclusively through the prism of each nation's preferred narrative. We examine the strategies history textbooks use to define identities: selective representations of the past, presenting the nation as the ultimate victim, and shifting responsibility for wrongdoings. We discuss the common elements in textbook identity politics throughout the region, and point to the ways in which they differ, both within and across countries.
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The subject of the article concerns the issue of constructing and reconstructing national identity. The object of interest here is a sociological case study of Serbian national identity. It includes reconstruction and interpretation of in-depth interviews conducted in Serbia with the representatives of Serbian symbolic elites. The concept of symbolic elites is approached in the discussed research from Teun van Dijk’s perspective. Thus, they are individuals and groups directly involved in the production of public opinion, who have an impact on the content of publicly available knowledge, and the creation and legitimization of public discourse. The work is embedded in the methodological framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and is based on the assumptions of the Discourse‐Historical Approach (DHA). In this optics, the most important thing is the historical and social context of the studied process of the discursive construction of national identity. Therefore, the conclusions...
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Starting with the 1990s a myriad of literary texts that tackle the Yugoslav wars have been published worldwide. Despite the wide variety of texts, scholars (Obradović, Pisac, Vervaet, Wachtel) have focused mainly on those written by ex-Yugoslav writers and on the representation of the former country in these books. This paper focuses on the aforementioned literary phenomenon – the representation of ex-Yugoslavia – from a broader perspective. My selection includes texts that originate in different geo-cultural areas. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to show that former Yugoslavia is not the only space represented in this cluster of texts. Other countries and cities, such as Germany, Ukraine, Amsterdam, or Shanghai, also play a significant role. I argue that the occurrence of these various spaces reveals a paradoxical pattern: the closer to ex-Yugoslavia the writer is or was, the more diverse the fictional spaces are, as well as vice versa. However, this geo-cultural diversity that defines post-Yugoslav migrant writers is constantly disregarded by critics, cultural journalists, and scholars, which is an indication of the hegemonic character of world literature.
Tracing the decline of Yugoslav identity: A case for 'invisible' ethnic cleansing
This essay explores the concept of invisible ethnic cleansing by examining the remaining group of self-identifying Yugoslavs who continue to identify themselves as such despite the break-up of Yugoslavia, the country that shaped and constituted the focal point of their identity. The analysis argues that the lack of recognition of the Yugoslav identity during the country's disintegration as well as afterwards in the individual republics befitted the new nationalistic and distinctly anti-Yugoslav narratives adopted by individual post-Yugoslav republics. The sheer existence and acknowledgment of the Yugoslav identity could therefore disprove the new nationalistic tenets. The essay begins by setting up an analytical framework for the study of invisible ethnic cleansing and Yugoslav identity by examining the concepts of ethnic cleansing, nationalism, group destruction and ethnicity. It goes on to establish the historical background for Yugoslavia's break up and looks at Yugoslavia's 'nationalities policy', the break up itself and the role of the West and the Western media. Finally, the study identifies the hegemonic power of current nation-states reflected in the media, education and government-sponsored intellectual efforts, as those that control the image of the past can erase from it the memory of the disappeared states and the identities connected to them. The bulk of the analysis and the conclusions drawn were based on personal memories and accounts of self-identifying Yugoslavs in order to preserve the memories of marginalized and forgotten groups as well as to stress the importance of counter-memory, which can challenge the narrative promoted by dominant groups and oppressive states. Moreover, the novel concept of invisible ethnic cleansing introduced will allow scholars to examine the loss of supranational identities, which accompany the dissolutions of multinational states.
The concepts of monumentality and collective memory have not been neglected by discourses concerning national identity. However, insights favouring forgetting and counter-memory are considerably new approaches reconstructing identities and redressing tragedy after pronounced violence. Erecting monuments is often a strategy towards building and inciting public memory and defining the nation, but they can also be used as a means of masking histories and manipulating national narratives – this is seemingly the case in a number of post-war monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia. The interplay between cultural heritage, memory, and space is a huge component of national identity; the installation of monuments memorializing non-Yugoslav celebrities throughout the newly defined states serve as a means to reconstitute identity, redefine heritage and avoid the celebration of a painful past. By consolidating existing theories on nationalism, identity and memory, this paper will examine the potential consequences of this manipulation of public space. Through a discussion of the way in which identities can strive to strategically avoid the state in the ‘non-commemoration’ of the nation and its inflicted traumas, I hope to demonstrate that the state is always present: that even through neglecting it – it is always referenced, that the framework of political sociology can operate, not just by identifying and treating the state as an actor, but also by simply acknowledging the state as spectre.