Postgraduate courses

Conflict, Trauma and Memory in the Modern Balkans

HT71128A 

Tutor:	Stefanos Katsikas
Duration:	One term
Assessment:	One 4,000-word essay
Unit value:	30 credits

Content
The past is never far behind. Recalled, fragmented, distorted, suppressed or neglected, memory operates constantly within both the individual and the collective psyche. This course explores the interplay between trauma and memory in the post-conflict Balkans during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Trauma - originally a wound to the body, but since Freud, more commonly understood as psychological or mental damage - is an important area within cultural studies, having emerged primarily in the context of post-Holocaust writing. It has influenced three key areas: war/political violence, gender, and post-colonial studies. This course will explore how the legacies of violence, torture and abuse in the Balkans, often a conflict-torn region in the last two centuries, are represented in historical narratives. It will explore phenomena such as repression, denial, amnesia, as well as the role of witnessing and healing. How does collective memory shape the construction of a subject? How do memory and history relate to the construction and representation of tradition, identity, nation? If tradition is intricately tied to horrific historical events, as was often the case in late 19th and 20th century Balkans, how can people understand the relationship between these pasts and the present? How to represent the unspeakable? How to convey trauma without merely producing pleasurable spectacle? These are some of the questions which this course will address. The primary focus will be Greece and Cyprus, but other Balkan countries will be also discussed. The course is mainly historical, but will also draw on sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis. The material to be studied ranges across history, oral history, film, literature, photography and art history.

Introductory Reading
Anastasakis, Othon, Bechev, Dimitar, and Vrousalis, Nicholas (eds), Greece in the Balkans : memory, conflict and exchange, Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars, 2009
Ballinger, Pamela, History in exile: memory and identity at the borders of the Balkans,Princeton : Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2003
Connerton, P., How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989
Misztal, B., Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University 2003