19.11.2024
Berlin
Gal Kirn: Contested Heritage of Yugoslav Liberation Struggle in Reverse: From Postsocialist Primitive Accumulation to Partisan Self-Reflexivity of Counter-Archive
The destruction of socialist and federal Yugoslavia did not follow a typical transition process of the 1990s: there was no happy and peaceful transition from socialism to capitalist democracy. Rather, as Boris Buden once claimed, the (post)Yugoslav transition can only be described in one word: a catastrophe. For our focus on »identity and heritage«, I will show how this catastrophe unfolded in the »mnemonic wars« of the late 1980s, which succeeded in weaponizing and nationalising ethnic victimhood and decontextualizing the liberation struggle. The anti-fascist legacy and the memory of the Second World War were increasingly called into question by revisionist ideology. This ideological shift was not only a matter of academic practise (Historikerstreit ala Yugoslave), but prepared the ground for the ethnic wars of the 1990s. What I called a process of »primitive accumulation of nationalist memory« (Kirn, Partisan Counter […]
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