Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Une guerre civile est un conflit violent impliquant un changement socio-politique dramatique qui devient un jalon historique, culturel et littéraire. C’est une période où les processus doubles de la déconstruction et de la reconstruction reformulent les lois, l’histoire et les identités communautaires. Le fait que ces transformations rapides impliquent une souffrance humaine massive est peut-être l’aspect le plus perturbant d’une guerre civile. Cette thèse analyse la façon dont les romans contemporains sur les guerres civiles de l’Espagne et de l’ex-Yougoslavie représentent l’expérience humaine au cours de ces périodes de transformations sociales chaotiques et violentes. A partir d’une étude comparative des œuvres, elle soutient que les romans représentent la condition humaine en se focalisant sur les expériences subjectives des gens ordinaires pendant les conflits, et en reléguant en arrière-plan les évènements politiques et militaires de la guerre civile. / A civil war is a violent conflict of dramatic political and social change that becomes a historical, cultural and literary marker. It is a period when laws, history and identities are reformulated through dual processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. This makes evident the symbolic dimension of civil war violence and accentuates the unstable, precarious and malleable nature of identity constructs, ideologies and history. The fact that these rapid transformations implicate massive human suffering is perhaps what is most unsettling about civil war. A civil war is not only a pivotal moment in a nation’s history but as well on an individual level for those who live through it and have to adapt to the changing systems of values that redefine life during and after the conflict. This thesis examines how contemporary novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav conflict reflect on the human experience during these periods of chaotic and violent social transformations. The study presents a comparative analysis of the following works: Camilo José Cela’s San Camilo, 1936, Dževad Karahasan’s Sara i Serafina (Sara and Sefarina), Mercè Rodoreda’s Quanta, quanta guerra… (War, so much war), Velibor Čolić’s Chronique des oubliés (Chronicle of the forgotten), Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (The backroom), David Albahari’s Mrak (Darkness), and Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salmanina (Soldiers of Salamis). Parting from a close study of the texts, the thesis argues that the novels represent the human dimension by focusing on ordinary people’s subjective experiences during the conflict while relegating the political and military events surrounding the civil war to the background. Such representations aspire to redeem the complexities and the significance of individual lives and of a social collective, which the civil war’s physical and symbolic violence dehumanizes, silences and obliterates.

While women are often excluded and/or portrayed as victims in the historical scholarship on war, this research builds on recent scholarship that shows women as active agents in warfare. I focus on Yugoslavia’s WWII Partizankas, female soldiers and activists, who held visible positions in the war effort, public consciousness and, later memory. Using gender as a category of analysis, my thesis explores Partizankas’ legacy and their contributions in the National Liberation Movement (NLM) in WWII (1941- 1945) and post-war nation building. I argue that the organizational framework of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front (AWF) under the guidance of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) emphasized women’s ethnic/religious identities along with distinct social standings and geographic locations to motivate them to fight for the common cause and subsequently forge a shared South Slavic identity. This emphasis on ethnic/regional/class differences paradoxically led to the creation of a common Yugoslav national identity. Women’s involvement, therefore, becomes central to the nationbuilding in the post-war period while establishing the legacy for future feminists. I characterize NLM as a Marxist guerrilla movement with the intent to contextualize the organizational tactics and ideological efforts of CPY and showcase the commonalities and differences the Yugoslav resistance movement had vis-à-vis other revolutionary movements that actively recruited women. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on the representations of Partizankas in popular culture and official rhetoric from WWII to the demise of Yugoslavia in 1991 in order explore the fluidity of gender roles and their perceptions. This research is meaningful because NLM, as an organized Marxist guerrilla movement, stands out in its size, success and legacy. The Yugoslav experience broadens the understanding of why women go to war, how gender norms shift during and after the conflict, and how female soldiers are remembered.

COMMODIFICATION OF THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY: YUGONOSTALGIAAS A MARKETING STRATEGY Jovana Vukcevic EHESS Paris, Charles University Prague Abstract: This paper focuses on a specific type of contemporary nostalgia for the Yugoslav past, emerging in recent years across the post-Yugoslav space - Yugonostalgia. This nostalgia creates a new Yugoslavia from the ashes of the old - a depoliticized Yugoslavia, not a state or an ideology, but a life story, a personal and social history that happened to take place within the former state. It is argued in the paper that Yugonostalgia can be understood as a longing for the solidarity, sociability and dignity of the socialist life-style, and even as a critique of the consumerist aesthetics of modern capitalism. However, in no way has it been a call to re-establish a Yugoslav state or to validate its ideological propaganda. Furthemore, in the intersection of capitalist profit-making and communist heritage, nostalgia has became more than a simple discursive construction, emerging from the idealized collective memory - it turned into a veritable marketing strategy exploiting Yugonostalgic symbols. Media campaigns that instigate warm feelings for Yugo-commodities and positive associations with the former state create new patterns of consumptions seeking to commercialize the...

This thesis examines how madness has been used in post-Yugoslav cinemas to facilitate thinking about experiences of the break-up of the SFRY throughout the 1990s and 2000s, its consequences and implications for the future. The study conceptualises post-Yugoslav film cultures as public spheres in which artistic and industrial practices are often combined to create meaning around the core themes of trauma and identity in post-Yugoslav cultures. Working with seven feature-length titles from a range of post-Yugoslav successor states (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo) I illustrate how images of madness have been essential in the cultural processing of events of the 1990s. Whilst featuring individuals suffering mental instabilities and disturbances, and sometimes asylums or mental health institutions, I contend such films are not ultimately concerned – on a thematic level – with mental health, but instead focus on the use of such characters in a metaphoric capacity for engaging core themes of Yugoslav break-up, conflicts, and difficulties of subsequent transition. Using the semantic/syntactic approach to genre, I identify two common ways in which madness is used on a textual level to engage these core themes. The first of these, the ‘inside-out asylum trope of madness’, is concerned with the use of the asylum in films which assess critically the dominant political ideologies of the successor states in question at a time when political pluralism was not yet established by the transition process. Films discussed include Burlesque Tragedy (Marković, 1995), Marshall Tito’s Spirit (Brešan, 1999), and Kukumi (Qosja, 2005). The second trope is the ‘multiple realities trope of madness’ in which the presentation of diegetic reality on screen is adapted to reflect various conceptualisations of trauma and loss arising from Yugoslav break-up and transition. Here the films include Loving Glances (Karanović, 2003), Fuse (Žalica, 2003), Mirage (Ristovski, 2004) and Land of Truth, Love and Freedom (Petrović, 2000). Across the films selected, it is madness which ultimately provides a diverse pool of metaphors and images for an assessment of Yugoslavia’s traumatic demise and the ensuing process of picking through the debris of its ideology, cultural practices, values and ways of living for precisely what might be salvageable and what should be discarded.

In 1918, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes established a kingdom called "Yugoslavia." Serbs were considering this state as the state of Serbs. Bosnia Hercegovina's community or political powers did not help the establishment of Yugoslavia. The official ideology considered Muslims as the heir of the Ottoman occupiers in the Balkans. In the first Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslims were under pressure and they were attacked by Serbs who had the official support of the administration. In time those attacks turned into ethnic cleansing. Bosnian Muslims were pushed out of the government bureaucracy and their lands.

The enduring question of why apparently ordinary individuals participate in the systemic perpetration of mass violence hallmarks genocide studies, and it arose yet again when the multifarious atrocities faced by civilians in the Yugoslav Wars of 1991–1995 were apparent. With explanations resting on notions of “ancient hatreds” having been denounced in favour of ones that emphasise the role of emotions like fear and resentment, ethnic myths and symbols, and competition on group and individual levels of society, there remains some issues with these approaches; they cannot account for what motivates variations in behaviour by on-the-ground perpetrators nor can they describe the process by which violence develops in tandem on micro- and meso-levels, while still accommodating macro-level causes for conflict. In this thesis, symbolic interactionist and social constructivist theories of social roles and social norms are applied in the search for finding the motives for violent behaviour by perpetrators in the Yugoslav Wars of 1991–1995 to establish a more complete understanding the dynamics of individual decision-making and collective action in the context of violence. A directed qualitative content analysis is conducted of testimony provided by twenty-nine on-the-ground perpetrators and by select witnesses. This testimony was collected from the Hugo Valentin Centre’s database of court transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The research revealed that the (dis-)organisation of the perpetrating groups’ social structures, as well as the presence, or lack thereof, of both role strain and role conflict were deciding factors in motivating violent behaviour.

This thesis examines how the creators of Croatian Jadran film - especially in the 1960s - portrayed the events bound to known historical reality, how they artistically interpreted this reality, and which historical events in the surveyed period were in the focus of their interest. In my choice of films I followed mainly the production aspect, which is also the main criterion of Croatian film historiography for selection of films in the national cinematography. From the topical perspective, the predominant motives relate to the people's liberation war or the civilian stories taking place in the background of war events. The movie Nevesinjska puška, which treats more ancient historical events, is the only exception. The production can also be characterised by the manner of explicating a historical theme. It features film spectacle, lyrical parable, and film interpretation which can serve as a material for historical research and analysis, or for studying the mimetic period between a generally accepted and understood historical fact, and its artistic rendition. The last mentioned is often featured with pictures from the partizan milieu. Except for some rare cases, the pictures reflecting historical events limited by the end of the World War II are distinguished by a collective, vaguely-specified...

<p>In the 60’s and 70’s a large group of Yugoslav migrants came to Sweden in search for jobs. These people mostly belonged to the generation born after the Second World War, a generation brought up in the official discourse of “Brotherhood and Unity”. A discourse downplaying ethnic differences in favour of a national identification. With the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s their Yugoslav national identity was beginning to be contested. The Serb migrants had to redefine themselves due to the changing situation and to replace or redefine their Yugoslav identities. This paper presents a case study for three individuals in this group and how they defined themselves before the break-up and how they handled the break-up. It presents how they today look upon Yugoslavia and how that place has changed meaning in their everyday narratives. The question I try to answer is whether someone can call himself Yugoslav when Yugoslavia no longer exists, and how the image of Yugoslavia has changed due to the break-up. I show that the image of Yugoslavia is still very much alive but this image has turned from a place in physical space to a place in their narratives, close to Foucault’s definition of a Utopian place. A place in their minds, perfected in form. They still call themselves Yugoslavs, if the social context allows that, they still use the term to relate to their origin and in discussions of place.</p>

In the 60’s and 70’s a large group of Yugoslav migrants came to Sweden in search for jobs. These people mostly belonged to the generation born after the Second World War, a generation brought up in the official discourse of “Brotherhood and Unity”. A discourse downplaying ethnic differences in favour of a national identification. With the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s their Yugoslav national identity was beginning to be contested. The Serb migrants had to redefine themselves due to the changing situation and to replace or redefine their Yugoslav identities. This paper presents a case study for three individuals in this group and how they defined themselves before the break-up and how they handled the break-up. It presents how they today look upon Yugoslavia and how that place has changed meaning in their everyday narratives. The question I try to answer is whether someone can call himself Yugoslav when Yugoslavia no longer exists, and how the image of Yugoslavia has changed due to the break-up. I show that the image of Yugoslavia is still very much alive but this image has turned from a place in physical space to a place in their narratives, close to Foucault’s definition of a Utopian place. A place in their minds, perfected in form. They still call themselves Yugoslavs, if the social context allows that, they still use the term to relate to their origin and in discussions of place.