'Troubled Pasts' and the Troubling Present

Biljana Kašić Department of Sociology, University of Zadar, Croatia The primary aim of this paper is to outline how the Croatian state in recent times governs the process of collective memory formations while both reviving old historical traumatic affects and enabling newly produced ones to be a vital impulse among various social groups and actors. Such a survey is provided through focusing on the three fields of analysis that illustrate this process: first, creation of the mainstream (political) narrative as a cultural matrix (Wolfgram 2014) for authorizing one single almost unified historical ‘truth’; second, public discourse as a signifier of symbolic violence of various kinds; and third, commemorative practices that instead of being cultural practices of grief and respect all the more emerge as zones of contestations of conflicting histories and/or divided communities. The past is a complex interplay between facts and meanings, forgetting and remembering; it is an imaginary of various narratives (Alexander 2012, Ashcroft 2001). While the Croatian master narrative tends to narrow the historical scope of understanding the violent past in favour of its own desirable mode, it will result in covert memory and inability to deal with conflicted claims, ruptures, different approaches and counter-narratives of other groups (ethnic ones,e.g.) or individuals referred to traumatic events from the past. The symbolic violence as a particular subject of attention is exposed and produced through distinctive representational regimes that “create frames of perception” (Butler, 2009), norms of recognition about positions in the past, and political judgment to a certain extent. Since there is no wider consensus achieved in the Croatian society concerning the recent violent conflicts, targeting the Serbian minority in particular, the public discourses are (mis)used to achieve a greater legitimacy for national mythical (“state”) matter rather than to reconcile across ethnic divide. On the one hand, the official discourse seems to be locked within the “victim-aggressor” pattern that nurtures its own trauma and silences its own crimes (Husanović 2015, Jansen 2002), on the other hand through radicalizing public discourses, inventions of ‘newold’ enemies, intolerance and hatred behaviours towards different ‘others’ have been enhanced. Political discourse and political stands today are inflected by collective memories and vice versa. The paper will also explore how current rituals of commemorative practices – those connected with the violent partition of Yugoslavia and the war against Croatia (such as the “Kolona sjećanja”, Vukovar [Remembrance March for Vukovar]) and with the Second World War (such as the Jasenovac concentration camp), as the main instruments of memory politics (‘containers of symbolism’) – become a way of national identity ‘consolidation’ and articulation strengthened by the state and a mode for deepening conflictive ethnonational narratives and social trauma. Apart from the manipulative efforts based on regulated politics of collective memory, there are singular interventions and certain actions at the micro society level that cultivate social hope toward reconciliation practices and potentially, an ethics of memory (Blustein 2008).