Chronotopes of Memory: Space, Time, and Narrative in the Monuments to the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Revolution I: Remembering Liberation: Socialist Yugoslavia’s Memorial Complexes and Their Social Roles

Abstract

The paper analyzes some of the key memorial sites of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle as chronotopic constructs to argue that they materialized collective memory as unusually rich assemblages of natural landscapes, built objects, and historical narratives. Architects and artists often borrowed these chronotopic constructs from each other, thus forming a dense intertextual network that tied monuments across Yugoslavia into a cohesive whole, despite their formal, stylistic, material, and other differences. Memorial sites thus collectively constructed a uniquely complex regime of historicity that played an integrative role for Yugoslav society.

Author

• Vladimir Kulic, Iowa State U