The article discusses the tensions and ambiguities and the political implications of the fact that what is today negotiated as industrial heritage is still part of lived experience of several generations of men and women in the former Yugoslavia. It argues that the issues of representation of industrial labor essentially have to do with the place dedicated to working communities, their members, and their voices and affects in museum narratives.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35814957
The chapter discusses emerging attempts to approach Yugoslav socialist legacy as cultural heritage in the post-Yugoslav societies and consequently to “museumize” it. These attempts are faced with a number of tensions and ambiguities that result from the fact that what is negotiated as Yugoslav socialist heritage is still part of lived experience of several generations of men and women in the former Yugoslavia, as well as from a long lasting neglect and delegitimization of socialist and Yugoslav legacy in Yugoslav successor states. Discussing the very possibility of a museum of socialism, the chapter argues that despite challenges that socialist heritage “in the making” faces in the post-Yugoslav societies, it contributes to fragmentation and democratization of the field of cultural heritage. The latter is not any more reserved only for experts and their authoritative assessments and interpretations, but becomes an arena for negotiation of different views, political demands, individual memories, experiences and affects. This way, the disperse and contested field of negotiation of the Yugoslav socialist legacy as cultural heritage acquires some characteristics ascribed to interrogative museum in recent heritage studies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36065069
The author investigates the attitudes and relationship of a generation that in the 1980s was part of a globalising and digitising world and despite living in the socialist Yugoslavia had access to “western” computer technology and games. The author traces contours of youth engagement with computers and games and poses the question whether in the former Yugoslavia, the contact with the technology significantly influenced the then kids’ understanding of socialism, Yugoslavia, modernity, democracy, freedom, technology. He argues that the contact with technology and the western “world of ideas” as represented by computer games had significant consequences for “inscription” of the individual into the global. The latter in fact became a key characteristic of a generation that throughout the 1990s became the actor or “unaware” participant in the wholesale digitisation that curiously coincided with uneasy being in the disenchanted post-youth, post-socialist period. The analysis is based on email interviews with respondents who at the time had a computer at home or played computer games at their friends’.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36379949