Suchergebnisse

This book argues that today we live in the culture of the past that delimits our world and configures our potentialities. It explores how the past invades our presents and investigates the affective uses of the past in the increasingly elusive present. Remembering and forgetting are part of everyday life, popular culture, politics, ideologies and mythologies. In the time of the ubiquitous digital media, the ways individuals and collectivities re-presence their pasts and how they think about the present and the future have undergone significant changes. The book focuses on affective micro-archives of the memories of the socialist Yugoslavia and investigates their construction as part of the media archaeological practices. The author further argues that these affective practices present a way to reassemble the historical and relegitimize individual biographies which disintegrated along with the country in 1991

This article argues that after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav rock music lost little cultural value and is still a prominent trigger of vernacular memories of the socialist Yugoslav past, as well as a vehicle of socio-political commentary in post-Yugoslav contexts. In this view, music is understood as a galvaniser of affective relationships to that past and to post-Yugoslav presents. In the first part of the article, the author discusses the theoretical and practical implications of digitally mediated music as immersive affective environments, working within the framework of media archaeology and a digital archives approach. It is argued that Yugoslav rock has retained its potency and appeal, where today, in a post-Yugoslavia context, it presents an outlet for the recomposition of musical preferences through nostalgia and opposition to the post-1991 socio-political developments. In the second part of the article, focusing on Facebook and YouTube, the author investigates how Yugoslav rock has been reframed in social media and how fragments of the country's past are reframed in digital media environments. A qualitative multimodal discourse analysis is employed here to investigate a selection of fan pages of rock musicians and bands.

Trivial though they may seem, popular culture and mass media actually present an important part of our quotidian and play significant roles in defining dimensions of our environments—past and present, internal as well as external. Mediatized images of bygone times and faraway places invade and transfix the physical geographies of the living environment; invade and transfix, extremely subtly, symbolic geographies of every single human being. Despite the fictitious nature and perceived triviality of cinema, literature and music, they feature as modes of representation and communication for a wide array of topics and issues that present an important part of human existence. Therefore, archaeology of popular culture might be a useful complement to other past-reconstructing practices.