Organized memory and popular remembering: The encounter of Yugonostalgia theories with socialism

Abstract

The article first examines the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of Yugoslav socialist past in Slovenia. We examine the discursive patterns in political dignitaries’ declarations and reconstruct popular remembering as it emerges from the existing research. We focus on theories that conceptualize positive popular attitudes towards socialist past with the notion of ‘nostalgia’. Following the ways how researchers overcome the difficulties of the ‘Yugonostalgia’ approach, we note that they do not take into account the embeddedness of the positive achievements of socialism into the overall fabric of socialist system. According to our hypothesis, this omission induces the researchers to overestimate the present social and political impact of positive attitudes to socialist past. Furthermore, social struggles in which researchers are engaged seem to raise barriers to scientific practice. This study attempts to contribute to the project of Yugoslav memory studies.