National Identities and
National Memories in the Balkans
edited by Maria Todorova
 The themes of memory and memorisation have emerged in recent years as phenomena which need to be understood at the collective, cultural level, and not merely as traces of individual experience. Consensus about the importance of these issues extends widely across the social sciences and humanities. This enterprise has been of particular interest in recent years in relation to Eastern Europe, as the collapse of the former Soviet imperium has allowed and demanded a substantial re-evaluation of authorised accounts of the past, and a recasting of these in view of the need to re-assess the relationship of the countries of the region to powerful outsiders. These processes have spanned the spectrum from the formal writing of history to the informal memorisation of the past in popular culture.
We are entering a ‘new era’ in that the tendency to portray identity-formation in the countries of these regions as taking place under the cultural hegemony of a powerful ‘West’ is now being partly replaced by a recognition that identities here are not only to be understood as constructions initiated by significant measure of responsibility for the creation and dissemination of identities. What is more, these indigenous creations are hardly less in need of demystification and deconstruction than those of outsiders.
The task of challenging these ideological ‘phantasmagoria’ (to use Marx’s term) is actually made more difficult because they are presented in the guises of ‘history’ and ‘memory’––often claiming to provide ‘authentic’ narratives of the past, validated in either personal or collective experience, to replace the ‘ideological’ confection of the Communist period. ‘History’ and ‘memory’ need to be understood as equally in need of critical scrutiny so that the latter state of the peoples of the region will not be worse than the former state.
The present volume contributes to a wider discussion about the nature of identity-construction in relation to the past, and to the vigorous debate already taking place within South-Eastern Europe. Its appearance is therefore timely.
MARIA TODOROVA is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Information about all the contributors can be found at the beginning of the book.
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