The Liberatory Potentials of Memory Activism in Central-East Europe and the Balkans

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel seeks to explore the ways memory activists instrumentalize the past in Central-East Europe and the Balkans to protest against contemporary injustices or advocate for current political goals. In sites ranging from post-Yugoslav choirs to monumental restoration in North Macedonia to Hungarian and Belarusian historical and activist theatrical productions, our panelists will look at memorial sites, practices, and performances that do not merely aim to commemorate past atrocities, traumas, and triumphant moments of the ‘imagined communities’ of the region, but to perform sociopolitical interventions in the present.

Many of the memory practices and performances discussed in this panel will interrogate how cultural memory informs current understandings and applications of the concept ‘liberation.’ These counter-memorial, minoritarian, or marginal memorial sites and practices aspire to liberate the mnemonic community from state-imposed nationalist, ethnocentric memory. Their affective and immersive sites and performances transform narratives of the past into embodied lived experiences and prompt these newly forged communities to relate to their histories outside capitalism, neoliberalism, and other hegemonic frameworks.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Maya Nadkarni, Swarthmore College

Papers

• Performing Unbelonging: Exploring the Hungarian Ethnic Identity within and beyond the Nation-State - Aniko Szucs, CUNY Queens College

• Art of Being Direct: Resisting Nationalism in the Work of the Belarus Free Theatre - Margarita Kompelmakher, Alliance Theatre

• Uses of Socialist Heritage: A Case Study from Kočani, North Macedonia - Patricia Manos, Harvard U

• Leisure for All: Memory Activism and the Exploitative Modes of Existence after Yugoslavia - Ana Hofman, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)

Discussant

• Maya Nadkarni, Swarthmore College