engleski

Bringing the Past Back to the Future: the Politics of Memory on the Example of Yugonostalgia

In this paper our aim is to analyse the contemporary cultural phenomenon of Yugonostalgia in Croatia, with respect to the countervailing positions taken up by different theorists of nostalgia, regarding the present politics of a nostalgic attitude to the past. In other words, our objective is to study Yugonostalgia in Croatia with regard to its conservative and restorative versus emancipating and reflective potentials and effects. We will look into different nostalgic representations of the past, with the sociological interest in the problem of power and the potential to subvert it leaning against the method of grounded theory construction, rather than the testing of pre-formulated hypotheses. We will thereby draw from Svetlana Boym's concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia, Dubravka Ugrešić's notions of the terror of forgetting and the terror of remembering, and several social theory contributions regarding nostalgia (e.g. Stauth and Turner, 1988 ; Frederic Jameson). We will accentuate that nostalgia is a way of knowing the world and give a connected critique of deep-structure rifts that can be found under many forms of both Yugonostalgia and its criticism, pointing to a perspective that opens up the possibility to view nostalgia as resonating, even if not manifestly, in numerous themes and fields of study in social sciences, cultural theory and humanities.

Nostalgia, past, Yugonostalgia, Croatia, war, post socialism, transition.

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