Neuspjela emancipacija. Hrvatska akademska historiografija i parcijalna kolektivna pamćenja
Unsuccessful Emancipation. Croatian Academic Historiography and Partial Collective Memory

Summary/Abstract: The author contemplates the complex question of the relation between the categories "collective memory" and "professional (academic) historiography" in contemporary Croatian frameworks, showing the negative influence the developed ideological complex in Socialist Yugoslavia had on the latter category. Starting from the founding myth of the order of the time, the "standard narrative" of the "people's liberation war and socialist revolution," the author warns of the clearly expressed orientation towards the mythic version of the past even within the professional historiography of the time. Analyzing the case of the Ustaše crime committed in Croatian Blagaj on May 8, 1941, the author depicts how the true course was mythologized within the "collective memory," with the key element of historiographic knowledge, the process of contextualization, being omitted. Thus, the established mythic version of the past with all its elements said very little about real events but explained and justified real social and political relations in Yugoslavia after 1945. The author cautions that the mythic version of the past has maintained its presence in the public space even after the (formal) fall of socialism and the disappearance of Yugoslavia in 1991, concluding that such a situation will continue until real social and political relations change.

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