Pamela Ballinger

Authentic hybrids in the Balkan borderlands

This article critiques prevalent assumptions about hybridity through analysis of identity in a quintessentially hybrid site, the western borderlands of the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on the case of a contemporary regionalist movement embracing a hybrid identity in the Istrian peninsula, it demonstrates the ways in which the hybridity concept replicates, both conceptually and in everyday life, the logics it ostensibly opposes. It does so by revealing the mutual constitution of discourses of purity and hybridity within the context of historical statebuilding projects in the region. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that understandings of difference and forms of exclusion grounded in both nature and culture have long histories along the eastern Adriatic. The operation of an avowedly culturalist conception of identity that nonetheless naturalizes and territorializes/grounds culture through horticultural and vegetative imagery foreshadows the cultural fundamentalism identified by Stolcke as a feature of contemporary Europe. It is suggested that the Istrian case, an example from the margins of Europe, proves productive for reconsidering hidden problematics of race and hybridity both in the empirical context of Europe and on the theoretical terrain of anthropology.

Exhumed histories: Trieste and the politics of (exclusive) victimhood

In Italy, the official sites for remembering World War II and its conclusion have increasingly become places at which divided memories are reproduced, rather than unity affirmed. This is most evident in the conflict of the past few years surrounding 25 April, the Day of the Republic or the Festa della Liberazione, which commemorates efforts by Italian Resistance movements in the north to rise up against the German Nazi occupiers. This date provided perhaps the central ritual moment legitimizing the democratic First Republic, founded in 1945 and in existence until the Tangentopoli corruption scandals led to its demise in 1992. While never wholly uncontested, until recently 25 April for the most part symbolized liberation. Today, however, some members of the Italian Right declare that 25 April brought liberation only to some parts and populations of Italy, while for others it signaled the beginning of communist reprisals and persecution. From the other direction, some voices on the Left have instead urged abolishing the holiday, given Berlusconi’s transformation of the 2003 celebration into a panegyric to American military aid. Italian President Ciampi instead articulates the position of those who believe that the traditional values of the Resistance and 25 April cannot, indeed must not, be forgotten or reinterpreted. To some degree, this wider debate over how to interpret the war’s end has nationalized local debates about memory in Trieste, where the war’s conclusion and the city’s occupation by Yugoslav troops for 40 days in April and May 1945, portended ‘liberation’ for some (the city’s Slovene minority and its left-wing activists) and ‘oppression’ for others (many ethnic Italians and members of the non-communist resistance). It is in Trieste, for example, that contestation over the meanings of 25 April has perhaps been most acute and where, in the last two or three years, local ritual commemorations have elicited intense national debate and discussion. At the same time, these debates over memory also prove quite specific to Trieste, where not only political ideology (Left/Right) but also ethno-national sentiment (Slovene/Italian) has fractured the memory of the population in the postwar period. Commemorations of atrocities—of those carried out by the Nazis and fascists in the extermination camp of Risiera di San Sabba, on the one hand, and by the Yugoslav partisans in the karstic pits known as the foibe, on the other—have for over a half-century served as key vehicles by which distinctions between the Slovene minority and Italian majority are reproduced. In addition, the memory of the tragic events of

History's illegibles: National indeterminacy in Istria

In the 1990s, the Julian (Giulian) Region that includes the cities of Trieste and Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula attracted the renewed attention of scholars for its qualities as a space in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalist polarization had flourished in the late Habsburg era. Although a healthy debate exists as to the degree to which forms of interethnic tolerance remain a feature of everyday life in these areas, most historians agree that this region underwent a series of increasing nationalizations (Italian, Slovene, Croatian, and Yugoslav) that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the partisan anti-Fascist uprising and massive demographic shifts after World War II, as the majority of Istrias “Italian” population (together with a significant number of individuals self-identifying as Slovene or Croat) migrated from the territory that passed from Italian to Yugoslav control. The historiography of the modern era in the Julian Region has thus confirmed many of the assumptions made by nationalist activists along this classic “language frontier” about the inevitability, exclusivity, and irreversibility of ethnonational identifications.

Adriatic Forum: A Comment

At first glance, the three essays that make up this forum dedicated to the Adriatic appear to chart a fairly standard course for scholarship on the region, depicting the area as one transected by conflict and contest or, alternatively, as a site of cultural mixing and coexistence. The reader quickly realizes, however, that all three authors offer innovative analyses that challenge, even as they build on, the body of work exploring the political and cultural contours of the Adriatic in the modern era. Much of this scholarship reiterates a reductive view of the Adriatic that sees it principally through the narrow prism of competing Italian and Slavic nationalist claims. Although Dominique Reill, Igor Tchoukarine, and Borut Klabjan address Italo-(South)Slav tensions and dialogues, they locate them in much broader frameworks that oblige the reader to rethink understandings of both the contents of these nationalisms and the contexts within which they developed. In different ways, for example, these papers highlight a seemingly obvious but little explored fact: The object of so much contestation and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just land, but also the sea that lapped the shores of the Adriatic territories.

Watery Spaces, Globalizing Places: Ownership and Access in Postsocialist Croatia

Many scholars have characterized political and economic globalization as entailing deterritorialization, a radical decentering of place and the erasing of various kinds of borders. This paper argues instead for an alternative view of globalization as reterritorialization, a process in which meanings of place remain salient (and in some cases become even more pronounced) but are reconfigured. The analysis focuses on transformations of understandings of territory and ownership in coastal Croatia, examining diverse Croatian responses to the privatization of the tourist industry and the speculative boom in vacation properties. In particular, the paper considers how the politics of European integration and Croatias aspirations for EU membership – together with the heritage of Croatias recent past of nationalist warfare – shape Croatias economic transition from a regime of “social property” under socialist Yugoslavia to a neoliberal regime of private property. The chapter also examines the metaphors of fluidity in vogue for describing globalization, using understandings of actual property in (and on) water to reflect critically on conceptual models of globalization.

A Sea of Difference, a History of Gaps: Migrations between Italy and Albania, 1939–1992

This article examines extended debates after World War II over the repatriation of Italian civilians from Albania, part of the Italian fascist empire from 1939 until 1943. Italys decolonization, when it is studied at all, usually figures as rapid and non-traumatic, and an inevitable byproduct of Italys defeat in the war. The tendency to gloss over the complexities of decolonization proves particularly marked in the Albanian case, given the brevity of Italys formal rule over that country and the overwhelming historiographical focus on the Italian military experience there. In recovering the complex history of Italian and Albanian relations within which negotiations over repatriation occurred, this article demonstrates the prolonged process of imperial repatriation and its consequences for the individuals involved. In some cases, Italian citizens, and their families, only “returned” home to Italy in the 1990s. The repatriation of these “remainders” of empire concerned not only the Italian and Albanian states but also local committees (notably the Circolo Garibaldi) and international organizations, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the International Committee of the Red Cross. In recuperating this history, the analysis rejects seeming truisms about the forgotten or repressed memory of Italian colonialism. Drawing upon critical theories of “gaps,” the article addresses the methodological challenges in writing such a history.

Mobile natures: tourism, symbolic geographies, and environmental protection on the Croatian Adriatic

This article analyzes shifts in the imagining of the eastern Adriatic from a backward periphery to a natural paradise, a process of symbolic definition in which mobile tourists have both played a key role. Examining discourses and practices of nature tourism on the island of Lošinj, the analysis focuses on the emergence of the dolphin as a key symbol in the islands contemporary tourist iconography and infrastructure. In what ways does the marketing of dolphins repackage the image of Lošinj as a site of health and nature that helped spread the islands fame as a tourist mecca over a century earlier? How does the interest in dolphins refract the global rise since the 1990s of tourism promising unmediated contact with ‘wild nature’? How to explain the paradoxical embrace of dolphins as an island symbol alongside the failure of recent efforts to establish a marine protected area (MPA) that would conserve the dolphin habitat? In answering these questions, the article inquires into the historical erasures and shifting boundaries of center/periphery required to sustain the vision of Lošinj as an isolated and unspoiled place. Simultaneously, political contests over dolphins encode anxieties about the islands future as a periphery within the European Union.

‘National Refugees’, Displaced Persons, and the Reconstruction of Italy: The Case of Trieste

After the era of state socialism in Europe came to a close in 1991, scholars began to rethink both the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it. Access to previously closed archives played a key role in the transformation of knowledge, but just as important was the questioning of seeming truisms. Tony Judt notes that What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air […] In retrospect the years 1945–89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century.1