Museums and Workers: Negotiating Industrial Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

The article discusses tensions, ambiguities, and political implications of the fact that what is nowadays negotiated as industrial heritage is still part of the lived experience of several generations of men and women in the former Yugoslavia. It argues that the issues of representation of industrial labor essentially have to do with the place given to the working communities, their members as well as their voices and affects in the museum narratives.

The Politics of Postcolonial Erasure in Sarajevo

“…It follows the struggles of museum employees to keep the museum running, which have resulted into the gradual morphing of the museum itself into a site of contention and one in which political grievances are aired. In line with Petrovic's (2012Petrovic's ( , 2013 argument about the memory of Socialist industrial labor still bearing powerful potential to articulate resistance in public debates in post-Yugoslav spaces, it is the living memory of the recent Socialist past, that in both cases presented here mobilizes affect, agency, and the language around which dissent (and solidarity) are engendered and articulated.…”

Ugljen i šminka. Narativi o jugoslavenskoj radnici na ponudi posttranzicijskom sjećanju

“…npr. Velikonja 2009: 540-543;Petrović 2013). Jednako na Zapadu 21 i na prostorima nekadašnjeg državnog socijalizma klasno pitanje, koje je u temeljima ovih "nostalgijskih sjećanja", njihovim mekim slijetanjem u kulturu neoliberalnog kapitalizma ostaje većinom zakriveno, a sjećanja lišena produktivnih aspekata svojega potencijala.…”

Global Diffusion of Protest

“…Whereas the educated urban youth constituted the majority of the 2013 demonstrators, in 2014 it was mostly the workers, unemployed, and pensioners who took to the streets. Workers are indeed a category considered more entitled than other social groups in protests since, during the socialist period, they had been an essential means for constructing a cosmopolitan, internationalist, modern, and supranational identity of Yugoslavs (Petrović, 2013). Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, the deindustrialization of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the privatization of its factories -the backbone of the Yugoslav economy -the role of workers declined dramatically.…”

“…Still vivid in their memories are the social and economic rights from which workers benefited during the socialist time, lost after the transition to market economy. Once celebrated in socialist times as heroes of work, workers are today transformed into its victims (Petrović, 2013). It is no surprise, then, that the protests spread from Tuzla to the pre-war industrial urban centers such as Zenica, Mostar, and Bihać, where the economic hardships hit the hardest and where the overwhelming majority of laid-off workers as well as other categories of unemployed citizens reside (Mujkić, 2016).…”