Unit for Global Justice event

Non-Governmental Memory: Cultural Heritage and Political Activism in Post-Yugoslavia

 

Seminar, 21 June 2011, 4.00 pm, WT1204

Prof Andrew Herscher

Prof. Andrew Herscher Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning,
University of Michigan

Amidst their post-conflict “transition,” the Yugoslav successor states have been deeply invested in the reconstruction of cultural heritage—the memorials, monuments and historic sites that were a frequent target of violence during Yugoslavia’s dissolution.

This reconstruction, however, comprises far more than an attempt to return a pre-existing patrimony to its pre-conflict condition. Rather, state-sponsored heritage reconstruction programs appropriate their objects as components of an official national culture and interpellate their subjects as that culture’s beneficiaries, custodians and/or heirs. Yet the interpellation of imagined or imaginary national communities around a posited cultural heritage has sponsored a variety of subject positions in the Yugoslav successor states, with state-sponsored preservation and reconstruction campaigns sponsoring not only identifications with heritage, but also counter-identifications and disidentifications.

These latter relations to heritage correlate to non-governmental political agencies that diverge from the obedient recognition and preservative respect sought by the state; this paper will explore these agencies, along with some of the political projects advanced through them.

This event is supported by the Department of Anthropology and the Unit for Global Justice.