Symbolic Nation-building through Images in Post-Yugoslav History Textbooks

The use of history textbooks in order to instill particular images of the nation and national identity has been widely recognized, with a proliferation of studies focused on the problematic content in textbooks. Yet, history textbooks rely on a range of other media like maps, graphs, illustrated timelines, and photographs, which also play an important role in visually signposting the nation. While some of these images serve primarily as a form of representation aligned with the text itself, other aspects of visual content distinctly and autonomously construct national identity. In this piece, relying on qualitative visual analysis, we point to the function played by images in symbolically constructing the nation in contemporary primary school textbooks in five post-Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.