engleski

Remembering through forgetting – politics of identity and street naming

As other post-socialist states in Europe in the 1990’s, Croatia replaced the official socialist discourse of the past with nationalist narratives of memory and homogenizing identity. Renaming of the streets was just one of the ways of organized and forced forgetting employed to legitimize new sites of memory. However, as a result of democratization and the anticipation of Croatia’s EU accession, alternative voices appeared in Istria, a historically multiethnic region with a considerable Italian minority. The continuous sociopolitical shifts throughout the last century led to the development of a strong political regionalist movement and the emergence of a regional identity as opposed to (several) national identities, with a celebration of multiculturalism. This process has been reflected also in the search for new self-representation of the regional centre of Pula. The city of Pula takes pride in its multicultural heritage which is publicly promoted in the city’s publications and by local politicians, figuring even as a marketing strategy for the city identity. The city authorities appointed a special expert committee for renaming the streets and to turn name plates into peculiar memory sites of the city’s cultural multilayered identity. In this paper I am concerned with the relation between memory and identity as revealed in present street names and discuss the extent to which their selection add new layers of meaning to urban space and reflect mixture through history, piecing together local heterogeneities. As every act of official remembrance through commemorative practices is accompanied by countless acts of forgetting, the focus of the analysis is on the articulation of multiple competing memories and a plurality of historical voices. The aim is to highlight both manipulations of public memory and subverting the past in pursuit of a regional political agenda, and innovative attempts to explore shared history of conflict and of common experience.

anthropology; Pula; street names; memory; identity

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