|
|
Mediating Communism: Slovenian Media Coverage of the Recent Past and Historical Reprogramming
| This paper aims to recapitulate the changes in the politics of media representation of the recent Slovenian past that were brought about by the disintegration of the socialist system in Yugoslavia in 1991. The basic concern is to show how Slovenia deals with its recent communist and Yugoslav past in the contemporary culture. On the micro case of documentaries and other media representations of this past period the paper tries to present how media texts serve as a medium for representing, constructing and reshaping the recent Slovenian past. They have power to set an agenda for public debates and to control the knowledge that circulate in the Slovenian society and in this regard also influence the historiography itself. Moreover, also the role of historians who are usually the main actors in these public (mediated) debates is going to be addressed. Such mediated debates and representations of the past that started in the Slovenian media in the late 1990s have shifted the focus away from the socialist and Yugoslav experience and have set new firm boundaries between dead, socialist, Balkan past and lively, capitalist, Western present in Slovenia. The paper argues that media reinterpretations of the communist and Yugoslav past try to eliminate the Yugoslav period and the communist past from people’s perceptions and memories. Moreover, these media texts present the process of reshaping the specific political and socio-economical system and of redefinition of common antifascist past experience in the people’s memories and their personal experiences.
|
|
|
|
