On Memory, Identity and War

Abstract

The past was ubiquitous in South Eastern Europe in the 1990s. On the one hand, historical analogies were widely and tendentiously used by observers and participants to render comprehensible the numerous conflicts that scarred the region, as the scripting of the Kosovo war of 1999 as a re-run of the Second World War exemplified. On the other hand, 'history' was also commonly adduced as a significant factor actually causing those conflicts. Western policy-makers and pundits interpreted them as the product of ancient ethnic enmities unleashed by the collapse of communism, while indigenous nationalists concocted extravagant narratives of historical victimization and destiny to ground new identities and mobilize populations for war. These representations exerted an important influence upon trends in scholarship on the region through the same period. First, the long-term genealogies of western 'Balkanist' perceptions were elaborated by historians, anthropologists and literary critics. Second, nationalist mythologizing was deconstructed by scholars positing alternative socio-economic and political causes of the violence. Third, drawing on wider bodies of scholarship exploring the work of memory under and after state socialism and in relation to the trauma of war, connections between memory,identity and war in the region began to be scrutinized. Of particular interest here were the role of historical narratives in grounding national and other senses of identity, the efforts by nationalists to co-opt or stimulate private memories of past traumas and wrongdoings as part of these projects (including the broader issue of the resistance to or negotiation of would be dominant memories at local levels) and the question of the agency of 'history'. The papers within this collection, first delivered at a conference organized by the University of Wales Centre for the Study of South Eastern Europe in 2000, contribute to the growing body of scholarship on these issues

Geographies of memory, place and identity: Intersections in remembering war and conflict

“…Boyarin (, p. 2) has expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that ‘[t]he past [is] mobilised for political purposes’ in the present, thereby hinting at the propensity for there to exist memories and myriad counter‐memories, official or otherwise, and equally political motives for mobilising processes of forgetting (Legg ; Navaro‐Yashin ). Struggles therefore exist between more fixed assertions of memory and fluid expressions of embodied memory, especially when collective memories are used to shape national identity and conceptions of belonging to the nation (Finney ).…”

the gothic scene of international relations: ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after september 11

“…As Patrick Finney points out, the employment of such analogies always serves a strategic purpose in political debate by laying claim to the moral high ground. 68 By positing Hussein as Hitler, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard position themselves as spectral Churchills. 69…”

Mapping the unassimilable: The Balkan other as meme in Val Lewton’s Cat People

“…Eastern Europe has been rendered as a gothic nightmare so often by now that these trends constitute a received meme, attesting to how ‘stereotypes derived from popular literature permeate contemporary discussions of the Balkans’ (Jackson, 2004: 111). Moreover, ‘powerful and persistent images of the Balkans and its people had coalesced over the centuries in western literary and political discourse’ (Finney, 2002: 3–4). These representations have served to imprint the notion that the region remains ‘a domain of exotic primitives prey to blood feuds and doomed to repeat a cyclical history of barbaric savagery’ (Finney, 2002: 2–3).…”

“…Moreover, ‘powerful and persistent images of the Balkans and its people had coalesced over the centuries in western literary and political discourse’ (Finney, 2002: 3–4). These representations have served to imprint the notion that the region remains ‘a domain of exotic primitives prey to blood feuds and doomed to repeat a cyclical history of barbaric savagery’ (Finney, 2002: 2–3). Films reproducing these notions are therefore party to a legacy of prejudice and ethnocentrism long overdue for an appropriate accounting.…”