Vjeran Pavlaković - Framing the Nation and Collective Identities

This book analyzes top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities through commemorative practices relating to events from the Second World War and the 1990s Homeland War in Croatia. With attention to media representations of commemorative events and opinion poll data, it draws on interviews and participant observation at commemorative events to focus on the speeches of political elites, together with the speeches of opposition politicians and other social actors (such as the Catholic Church, anti-fascist organizations and war veterans and victims organizations) who challenge official narratives. Offering innovative approaches to researching and analyzing commemorative practices in post-conflict societies, this examination of a nations transition from a Yugoslav republic to an independent state and now the newest member of the European Union constitutes a unique case study for scholars of cultural memory and identity politics interested in the production and representation of national identities in official narratives.

Vjeran Pavlakovi is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his PhD in history in 2005 from the University of Washington and has published articles on cultural memory, transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia and the Spanish Civil War. His recent publications include Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (2016) and Monumental Narratives: Memorials and Memory Politics of the Croatian Homeland War in In Memoriam Republika Hrvatska (2017). He is also the lead researcher on the project Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of Twentieth Century Traumas funded by the Croatian Science Foundation.

Davor Paukovi is Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Dubrovnik, Croatia. He received his PhD in contemporary history in 2010 from the University of Zagreb. He teaches courses in contemporary Croatian and world history. He has published five edited volumes and a dozen articles on political transition in Croatia, dealing with the past, dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Serb minority in Croatia and Serbo-Croatian relations. He is currently editor in chief of the international journal Contemporary Issues and a researcher on the project Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of Twentieth Century Traumas funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. His recent publications include Croatia and the European Union: Changes and Development (2016).

Series editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler

Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The past in the present has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that migrant memories; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.

This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.

Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

Golnar Nabizadeh

Framing the Nation and Collective Identities

Political Rituals and Cultural Memory of the Twentieth-Century Traumas in Croatia

Edited by Vjeran Pavlakovi and Davor Paukovi

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1411

Edited by Vjeran Pavlakovi and Davor Paukovi

First published 2019

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ISBN: 978-1-138-50401-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14573-0 (ebk)

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VJERAN PAVLAKOVI AND DAVOR PAUKOVI

PERO MALDINI

RENATO STANKOVI

BENEDIKT PERAK

DAVOR PAUKOVI

VJERAN PAVLAKOVI

IVOR SOKOLI

DARIO BRENTIN

ANA LJUBOJEVI

TAMARA BANJEGLAV

NIKOLINA IDEK

ANA MILOEVI