Afterword

Abstract

If “articulating the past historically,” as Walter Benjamin provocatively put it, “does not mean to recognize it the way it really was but to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” (Benjamin 1968, 255). then the recent increase in memory being seized—through modes such as digital recordings, personal records, and DNA kits—point to a world replete with danger. The danger is not always real—it is its perception and evocation that is often at play when agents and actors with power take control over memory and the past. Inevitably, seizing hold of memory is only one part of the task; safeguarding it is the other. Danger and fear commonly work together here, because if the protection of memory, and the past, is mediated through vested agencies, the memory will lose its typical ambivalence and be distilled as “truth.” This volume offers a glimpse into interpretative solutions for such dilemmas as it grapples with history writing in and of Yugoslavia and its successor states. Interlocked in the recognition that national historiographies that uphold grand narratives with linear and often teleological consistency are inadequate, these wide-ranging essays also show how such narratives persist across the region, brushing against the grain of history and defying the realities on the ground.