An archive to build a future

The recovery and rediscovery of the history of socialist associations in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina

Bibliographic Data

ID7796880
AuthorsLarisa Kurtović (0000-0001-8839-3352, Russian State Agrarian Correspondence University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume30
Issue1
Pages20-46
Publication date2019-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757206.2018.1532893
OpenAlexW2901319330
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited30

This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition

Archaeology · Communism · Context (archaeology · Disenchantment · Political science · Political subjectivity · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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