Memory, post-socialism and the media: Nostalgia and beyond

Abstract

it offers a critical review of the main trends in existing research, focussing on four key issues: the fascination with nostalgic modes of remembering, the dominance of national frames of analysis, the lack of research on the mediation of personal and vernacular remembering, and the privileging of descriptive over explanatory modes of analysis. Second, the article outlines a new agenda for the field, and proposes three main research trajectories. The first pays attention to how mediated memories at local and national levels interact with transnational processes of remembering the Cold War, the second focusses on to the intersections between personal and public modes of mediated remembering, and the last moves the discussion from description to explanation, using comparative approaches to advance explanations of different modes of mediated postsocialist memories.Keywords: memory, media, post-socialism, nostalgia, television, transnational memoryThe demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe triggered a profound restructuring of individual and collective relationships with the socialist past. Released from the straightjacket of Cold War politics, memories of the Second World War, the communist takeover and the decades of life under communist rule provided a rich resource for politically driven mythmaking across the political spectrum, as well as for creative engagements with the past in the visual arts and museums (e.g., Bernhard and Kubik 2014, Boym 2001, Sarkisova and Apor 2008, Tileaga 2012, Todorova and Gille 2010. Narratives of the socialist past also became important at vernacular and everyday level, and served as vehicles for making sense of the post-socialist transformation and for orienting one's own sense of identity and belonging (e.g., Berdahl 2010, Mark 2010, Mihelj 2014, Rabikowska 2013. The rich and growing body of scholarly work on post-socialist memory has by now provided important insights into the varied layers and processes of memory formation in the region, ranging from public to vernacular and personal memories, as well as helped further our understanding of mnemonic processes more generally, elucidating the ways in which they are affected by rapid political, economic and social changes.In recent years, the role of the media in shaping post-socialist memories has also begun to attract attention. One of the notable traits of existing research in this area is its preference for small-scale case studies focused on a single medium and situated in specific national locales (for an exception see Volčič 2007). So far film has received the most concerted attention, with studies typically privileging the analysis of cinematic texts over the analysis of audience reception and the political and economic uses of mediated representations of the past (Bardan In contrast, research concerned with the mnemonic functions of television is more sociologically minded, pays less attention to televisual representations themselves, but regularly reaches beyond the analysis of television programmes to investigate h...

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