Building monuments, unleashing anger: The material disruption of contested memoryscapes

Abstract

This paper explores the post-war memoryscapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina via (defaced and destroyed) monuments evidencing the habitual struggle to disrupt and reorder space, and reinterpret the traumatic past. Analysing a combination of digital and fieldwork data, I make a case for interpreting attacks on monuments as a civilian retaliatory agency, exerting spatial hegemony and substantiating resentful affective regimes (especially in relation to the most recently imposed legal ban on the denial of genocide in Srebrenica). In doing so, I consider how citizens’ “truths” are enacted by distorting loss and violence, while collective trauma persists. This paper further illustrates how peculiar remembrance practices modify the standard purpose and meanings of a monument, contextualizing monuments within a larger framework of post-conflict spaces.