Submerged politics, exiled histories: Memory and identity at the borders of the Balkans.

摘要

This thesis examines contemporary debates about the "Istrian exodus," the mass flight of ethnic Italians that occurred after World War II when the Istrian peninsula passed from Italian to Yugoslav sovereignty. Through analysis of narratives and practices that forge memories of displacement, the dissertation asks a central question: How does a classic borderzone give way to modern states and how can a perspective from the periphery illuminate the development of both homogenizing nationalisms and transnational movements celebrating hybridity? Why do border areas prove fruitful sites from which to consider the rebundling of sovereignty claims, as well as the reconfiguration of historical narratives about state-making?; In answering these questions, the dissertation draws upon material gathered during twenty months of fieldwork in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. Methods employed included participant- observation, formal interviewing and archival research. Works consulted in the course of archival research include local newspapers from the period of the exodus, 900 statements given at the time of events by Italians fleeing Istria, Allied Military Government documentation at the U.S. National Archives, and contemporary journals and books published by Istrian exile associations in Italy. Analysis of oral and written histories revealed extensive continuities between narratives of exodus articulated today with those produced at the time of events, as well as earlier nationalist understandings.; Situating contemporary accounts of exodus in fight of older narrative frameworks, I argue against narrowly presentist interpretations of identity. Instead, I look at the way that memory is continually made in the present through frameworks that have been given though time. Viewing contemporary historical consciousness as shaped by a century of war and state recomposition, my project denaturalizes borders and reveals the Julian March's historical construction as a zone in which there have emerged competing discourses about "pure" and "hybrid" identities. I conclude that in such borderzones, discourses about purity and hybridity have lengthy and shared histories, with notions of hybridity leaving in place assumptions about "essential" or pure cultural wholes. This finding refutes the claim, prevalent in much current social theory, that hybridity represents a novel political alternative to essentialist understandings of identity.