NOSTALGIA IN THE DISCOURSES OF THE YOUTH IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

NOSTALGIA IN THE DISCOURSES OF THE YOUTH IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Mandić, Maja

This paper analyzes how students of 7 Bosnia and Herzegovina's (BiH) universities discursively construct their ethnic and national identities in relation to the country's past as one of the republics of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) . The discourses, obtained in 8 focus groups, are analyzed within the framework of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which sees discourse as socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned (Fairclough, 2001). The aim of the paper is to show how young people in BiH represent and legitimize their ethnic/national identities with respect to the representation of their country's socialist past, its influence on BiH's post-war crisis and the role of nostalgia in their political imagination. As a politically unstable country post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina struggles with envisaging its future, largely because the society is highly divided along the ethnic lines. The memory of SFRY has been perceived as extremely significant in both positive and negative terms, causing ambiguous attitudes to how Yugoslavia's social heritage is to be viewed in present-day BiH. Young people's opinions on their country's pre-war past and its influence on their identities are often contradictory, resulting in confusing discourses of nostalgia and rejection. Given that SFRY is seen as both a cause of the 1992-1995 war in BiH and an object of (borrowed) nostalgic discourse, the paper discusses

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

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