The Fascist Genie is Out of the Bottle: Pop Culture and Memory Politics in the Former Yugoslavia

The wars of Yugoslav dissolution were accompanied by the dismantling of antifascist memory cultures, with new monuments, museums, and memorial sites replacing the socialist modernist landscapes of Yugoslavia. Across the successor states, but with particular intensity in Croatia, nation-building narratives have sought to overwrite or selectively reinterpret the legacies of antifascism and socialism. Three decades later, these narratives are firmly institutionalized not only through official memorial practices but also through popular culture. Alongside the hyper-production of monuments since the late 1990s, memory politics have turned to subcultural and popular media—commemorative murals, political graffiti, popular music, and films that reframe both socialist Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space. These pop cultural products function as powerful instruments of memory-making that reproduce, contest, or satirize dominant narratives. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of the MEMPOP project (www.mempop.eu), this lecture examines how mnemonic murals, music, and film in the former Yugoslavia operate within this contested cultural field and asks whether they can serve not only to reinforce nationalist mythologies but also to open space for alternative narratives, pluralistic memory, and reconciliation.

Speaker:

Vjeran Pavlaković is a Professor of History and Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2005 from the University of Washington and has published articles on memory politics in Southeastern Europe, transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. He is a co-editor of the volume Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia (Routledge, 2019) and author of Memoryscapes of the Homeland War (YIHR, 2022). Current research includes graffiti and murals as sites of memory, Balkan memoryscapes, and a history of Dalmatian immigrants in Arizona.