Engaging with the popular-cultural imaginary and mediatized afterlives of the former socialist Yugoslavia, this talk reflects on the relationship between memory work and contemporary popular culture. While memory work entails different practices that “stage memory through words, spoken and written, in images of many kinds, and in sounds”, “translat/ing/ the psychical activity of warding off loss into the domain of the social” (Kuhn 2000), popular culture is a transmedial site of multimodal collective memory production, negotiation, contestation, and consolidation. However, popular-cultural tropes remain under-researched as tools for memory work, limiting our understanding of how popular culture contributes to shifts in collective memory on various scales, and how aesthetic, affective, and narrative repertoires coalesce in popular-cultural accounts of the past to produce mnemonic impact. Focussing on the post-Yugoslav space and drawing on examples from films, music, and videogames that engage with the recent past in an interrogative and open-ended way, the talk proposes to re-evaluate the significance of memory work to memory popularization, and thus to the memory politics of popular culture. Additionally, a comparison of this popular-cultural imaginary of the “post-Yugoslav condition” with insights from a large corpus of oral history interviews is presented to highlight in what ways popular culture not only archives stories about the past, but also the structures of feeling that mark our relationship to this past, presenting an interactive barometer of collective memory.
Presented by the Memory Studies Network (MSN) of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research.
Natalija Majsova is an Associate Professor of cultural studies and Head of the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research cuts across the fields of memory studies, film and media studies, heritage interpretation, and (post-)socialist popular cultures. Her research interests include memory studies, cultural theories, film studies, and media archaeology. She has authored numerous articles in foreign and Slovenian scientific journals and two books on space, film and utopias, including, Soviet SF Cinema and the Space Age: Memorable Futures Lexington Books (2021). She is co-editor of the journal Social Science Forum, and PI on a Slovenian-Croatian research project on mnemonic aesthetics and strategies in popular culture MEMPOP (2023–2026, co-led with Croatian PI: Vjeran Pavlaković) and a research project on remembering the early digital age TECHNOPST (2023–2025).
The Memory Studies Network at the New School is based at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) under the auspices of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). It was launched more than a decade ago by a cohort of graduate students. The conferences they organized over time that brought together leading scholars in social, cultural, and public memory across the disciplines, the fellowship programs, and finally an array of outstanding dissertations, made the New School a recognized site of Memory Studies, and one that contributed to shaping and establishing it as a field of study in the United States.
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Natalija Majsova is an Associate Professor of cultural studies and Head of the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research cuts across the fields of memory studies, film and media studies, heritage interpretation, and (post-)socialist popular cultures. Her research interests include memory studies, cultural theories, film studies, and media archaeology. She has authored numerous articles in foreign and Slovenian scientific journals and two books on space, film and utopias, including, Soviet SF Cinema and the Space Age: Memorable Futures Lexington Books (2021). She is co-editor of the journal Social Science Forum, and PI on a Slovenian-Croatian research project on mnemonic aesthetics and strategies in popular culture MEMPOP (2023–2026, co-led with Croatian PI: Vjeran Pavlaković) and a research project on remembering the early digital age TECHNOPST (2023–2025).