Yugoslav Memories III: The Impact of Popular Cultural Memory Work in Post-Yugoslav Spaces

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel illuminates the concept of memory work in the context of modern popular culture in post-Yugoslav spaces. The idea that popular culture might be a productive area for memory work is somewhat counterintuitive. Memory work entails different practices that “stage memory through words, spoken and written, in images of many kinds, and in sounds”, “translat/ing/ the psychical activity of warding off loss into the domain of the social” (Kuhn 2000). This panel asks, what kind of affordances for memory work are offered by modern popular culture, as characterized by commercialization, media convergence and platformization? Despite insightful complications of this discussion (cf. Jenkins 2006), popular culture remains associated with consumption, more than with participatory remembrance practices. The impact of these practices and cultures remains relatively underresearched, although participatory (remembrance) cultures and their practices of working through imaginaries of the past to imagine new futures have been identified by scholars (cf. Hofman 2020, Kirn 2019, Petrović 2024) as an element of contemporary popular culture. Offering an analytical panorama of examples from the post-Yugoslav space, where individual and collective memory work is an important tool for countering dominant ethnonationalist narratives and neoliberal models of mainstream cultural production, this panel addresses the outlined mnemonic ambivalence of modern popular culture. Researchers working on popular music, cinema, and street cultures will address urgent questions in popular culture and memory studies, pursuing the link between the popular-cultural memory production-distribution-reception circuit, and the sociocultural significance of diverse sensibilities, ranging from regional solidarities to amnesias.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Mat Muntz, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Market-Driven Memory Loss: Mainstream Trap in the Post-Yugoslav Region - Jernej Kaluža, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

• Border Crossing, Contested Communication, and Solidarity in Domestic Hip Hop Documentary - Owen Kohl, Grinnell College

• Screening Memories, Implicating Subjects: Articulations of Solidarity in Post-Yugoslav Memory Film - Natalija Majsova, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

• Post-Yugoslav Commemorative Street Art: From Hegemonic Narratives to Slow Memory Activism - Vjeran Ivan Pavlakovic, U of Rijeka (Croatia)

Discussant

• Ivana Polic, Florida State U