Summary: | The concepts of monumentality and collective memory have not been
neglected by discourses concerning national identity. However, insights favouring
forgetting and counter-memory are considerably new approaches reconstructing
identities and redressing tragedy after pronounced violence. Erecting monuments is
often a strategy towards building and inciting public memory and defining the
nation, but they can also be used as a means of masking histories and manipulating
national narratives – this is seemingly the case in a number of post-war monuments
throughout the former Yugoslavia. The interplay between cultural heritage,
memory, and space is a huge component of national identity; the installation of
monuments memorializing non-Yugoslav celebrities throughout the newly defined
states serve as a means to reconstitute identity, redefine heritage and avoid the
celebration of a painful past. This paper will examine the potential consequences of
manipulating public space through the erection of structures that function to
disguise. By discussing the way in which identities can strive to strategically avoid
the state in the ‘non-commemoration’ of the nation and its inflicted traumas, I hope
to demonstrate that the state is always present: That even through neglecting it – it
is always referenced, that the academic conceptions of the state can operate, not
just by identifying and treating the state as an actor, but also by simply
acknowledging the state as spectre. By comparing these contemporary structures to
the numerous national monuments dedicated to victims of fascism built after the
Second World War, I will show how the relationship between the state and memory
has shifted in some regards and stayed the same in others.
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