The Memory of Liberation: Studies on the People’s Liberation Struggle in the (Post-) Yugoslav Context

The book Memory of Liberation comes more than three decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and in the light of 80 years of end of World War II. It departs from a critical survey of the gradual and, at times, violent abandonment of the public memory of antifascist and Partisan legacy in the post-Yugoslav context. Work is critical towards a dominant ethno-nationalist trend in the politics of memory and revisionist historiographies, that have to do also with the process of capitalist restructuring (denationalisation, privatisation). Contrary to the dominant ideological trend that sees no alternative in the future and keeps demonising any emancipatory past, this book’s primary goal is to retrace and defragment what now resides scattered along what used to be a common state: the emancipatory fragments related to the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle. The essays/chapters in this book are studies of the diverse historical political moments and (art)works, graphic art, poems, photographs from ecological, women, and emancipatory perspectives. It also demonstrates how some of the partisan moments were remembered in socialist Yugoslavia (eg films and monuments), and in what way in current postsocialist situation these fragments of emancipatory past are becoming sources and inspirations of new struggles.