In February 2014, one of the most renowned singers of the Albanian communist period, Vaçe Zela—People’s Artist since 1977, and 10-time winner of the annual Festival of Song—died in Switzerland where she had immigrated.Footnote 1 The news was followed by days of mourning in Albania, which culminated in a funeral organized at the National Theater of Opera and Ballet. A nostalgic prime minister, the minister of culture, other politicians, and fellow artists from the communist period and from the postcommunist contemporary art scene paid their respects at the funeral, while articles, op-eds, and posts in the media and social media honored her legacy. Referring to her by her first name, Vaçe, adults of all ages recalled her songs in discussions on television and social media. Some even expressed resentment that only the Albanian political and cultural elite could attend the ceremony, while ordinary citizens had to gather outside.Footnote 2 In her eulogy, Nexhmije Hoxha, the wife of Albania’s late communist dictator, described the singer as the best Albanian star of all time, discovered and cultivated by the socialist state and supported by her late husband and herself (Bushati Reference Bushati2014; Hoxha Reference Hoxha2014). The whole country seemed to mourn “the queen of song,” “the legend of song,” “our glorious singer,” and “the absolute diva” (Nikolli Reference Nikolli2014c), using superlatives to mark her passing.
But Fatos Lubonja, a former political prisoner of the Hoxha regime and now a public intellectual, columnist, and critic of the Hoxha dictatorship, provided a prominent dissenting voice. Lubonja (Reference Lubonja2014a) called the de facto state funeral and the public euphoria around Vaçe’s legacy a collective “hysteria.” He reminded the Albanian public that communist-era songs, especially Vaçe’s, were played in prisons and labor camps as forms of torture. He further argued that honoring Vaçe’s legacy in the Albania of 2014 was infantile, morally corrupt, hypocritical, and unrepresentative of people’s real musical tastes under communism. Lubonja’s views met a strong countercritique from artists and the general public in social media and the press. Commentators positioned themselves as either “with Lubonja” or, more commonly, “against Lubonja,” with some of his most bitter critics, mainly artists, demonizing him for “desecrating” the iconic figure of Vaçe. Aurela Gaçe, a prominent postcommunist singer, went so far as to associate Lubonja with a devil’s emissary (Gaçe Reference Gaçe2014). Agim Doçi, a lyricist of both periods, called Lubonja an anti-Albanian and a nihilist, committed to demystifying all national symbols (Nikolli Reference Nikolli2014a). Other more sober critiques sympathized with Lubonja and recognized the validity of his story, but relegated Lubonja’s account to the margins of the country’s collective memory, dismissing his narrative as particular and ascribing to the wider cheering public the universal, representative, and natural approach toward the artistic heritage of the communist period.
This memory episode is a microcosm of commemorative battles over cultural and artistic heritage. How do societies navigate the symbolic and artistic heritage of troubled pasts? How do they determine what is collectively commemorated or disavowed? How is the space of particularity, plurality, and representation negotiated when heritage is contested? I suggest that such battles happen within memory fields and memory regimes that order the space of remembrance. I build on Bernhard and Kubik’s (Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014) theorization of official memory regimes in the postcommunist space, and conceptually borrow from Chantal Mouffe (Reference Mouffe2005; Reference Mouffe2013) and Lisa Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2019) to demonstrate how memory regimes actively govern the public mnemonic space beyond the official level. Mnemonic regimes are hegemonic frames that order memory by providing a semantic and sentimental template for the valuation, devaluation, dismissal, and even intelligibility of people’s experiences of the past, as well as for their feelings of sympathy, empathy, skepticism, solidarity, and indifference toward these experiences. I trace collective memory narrative governance within what Bernhard and Kubik (Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014, 17–18) call a unified memory regime, in which official actors prefer not to shake up the status quo or to fight battles in and around memory. Unified memory regimes emerge as proactive frames of official political meaning-making posited on unity and consensus as their governing principle, demanding the subversion of competing narratives and sentiments that risk reordering the space of remembrance.
While Bernhard and Kubik are concerned with official memory regime emergence, I explore regime sustenance instead. I argue that unified memory regimes order, discipline, and govern not only the official but also the everyday spaces of judgment and affection. Posited on unity and consensus at the official level, these hegemonic frames of meaning-making relegate mnemonic tension from the official level to the societal level where discursive battles continue to take place. I further argue that unified memory regimes present particular challenges for societal pluralists during moments of contestation. Because pluralists have a structural commitment to acknowledge and agonistically deliberate on multiple interpretations of the past, they may attempt to facilitate discussion by affirming and trying to reconcile both the emerging societal-level mnemonic fracture and the official unified memory regime. But this consensus-seeking strategy can backfire, inadvertently reinforcing the unified memory regime and disciplining the societal-level challenger through three common discursive practices that I call the traps of consensus: semantic alignment, a syntax of disavowal, and the juxtaposition of “universal” and “particular” narratives about the past. Pluralists may be especially prone to fall into these traps when they face unified memory regimes in which the consensus narrative itself appears superficially pluralist (or “underspecified”) because such consensus eschews normative judgments that distinguish between perpetrators and victims.
I demonstrate the inner workings of a unified memory regime in the case of the contestation over Vaçe’s legacy in postcommunist Albania, tracing an attempted fracture at the societal level, an antagonistic societal-level response, and societal pluralists manifesting deliberative discursive behavior that ultimately served to sustain the unified regime. I use two main sets of data throughout the analysis. I conducted fieldwork in Albania in 2021–22 and in 2023, approaching the field with an ethnographic sensibility (Pader Reference Pader, Yanow and Schwartz2014; Simmons and Smith Reference Simmons and Smith2017). For my analysis of the memory field and its thematic relationship with communist-era art and artists, I draw on a subset of 14 semistructured interviews conducted with communist and postcommunist cultural elites and administrators, two interviews with Albanian members of parliament, and extensive archival research. I approached my interviews through an ordinary language lens (Schaffer Reference Schaffer, Yanow and Schwartz-Shea2014) and reflexive thematic analysis meant to explore narrative themes and within-data hierarchies (Byrne Reference Byrne2022). I used archival research for corroboration and to better understand the political and institutional dynamics during communism and the first years of postcommunist transition. For the analysis of the contestation over Vaçe’s place in the unified memory regime, my primary data includes newspaper articles, op-eds, blog posts, critiques, and countercritiques published by and about Lubonja and his reaction to the honoring of Vaçe Zela’s legacy. I approach these statements through the lens of discursive practices (see Dreyfus and Rabinow [Reference Dreyfus and Rabinow1983] on the Foucauldian tradition), and I also explore tensions manifested within language structures (Vehbiu Reference Vehbiu2007; Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019; Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005).
Memory Regimes and the Ordering of the Past
Originally developed to study postcommunist remembrance of the 1989/1991 fall of communist regimes, Bernhard and Kubik’s concepts of memory fields and memory regimes have become pivotal in understanding organized official accounts about the past. Bernhard and Kubik (Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014, 16) define a memory regime as “(1) an organized way of remembering a specific issue, event, or process (2) at a given moment or period,” and it becomes an official memory regime “when a government and/or the major political parties are involved in this process.” A memory field is the compound of all memory regimes governing the space of remembrance.
The form that a memory regime takes (unified, pillarized, or fractured) is the result of the constellation, interaction, and positionality of mnemonic actors, who are “political forces that are interested in a specific interpretation of the past” (Bernhard and Kubik Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014, 4). Mnemonic warriors draw sharp distinctions between their own “true” vision of the past and others’ “false” ones, leading to fractured memory regimes when they are politically empowered. Their absence as salient political actors leaves regimes either pillarized or unified. Empowered mnemonic pluralists favor pillarized memory regimes, which embrace an official tolerance of and deliberation on different interpretations of the past. Mnemonic pluralists “believe that others are entitled to their own visions. If they disagree with those visions, they are ready to engage in a dialogue whose principal aim is the orderly pursuit of ‘the truth,’ discovery of the areas of overlap among the competing visions, and articulation of common mnemonic fundamentals that allow discussion among competing versions” (13, emphasis in original). Finally, official unified memory regimes “are predicated on agreement over the interpretation of the past” on a specific issue, meaning that all official “actors are de facto abnegators” who avoid meaningful political engagement with memory contestation (17).
The concept of memory regimes precedes Bernhard and Kubik (see Langenbacher Reference Langenbacher2003; Radstone and Hodgkin Reference Radstone and Hodgkin2003) and has been further developed in parallel to (see Hannoum Reference Hannoum2019) and in conversation with (Dujisin Reference Dujisin2024; Nienass Reference Nienass2020) their account, but their contribution was novel in building a theory of mnemonic actors and memory regimes that contends with variation in both actors and prevailing mnemonic structures. Their operationalization of the effects of political actors’ positions and interactions with the structure of official mnemonic regimes has been employed in comparative work (see Björkdahl et al. Reference Björkdahl, Buckley-Zistel, Kappler, Selimovic and Williams2017; Pettai Reference Pettai2016; Trajanovski Reference Trajanovski2020) as well as extended to the unofficial level (Tomczuk Reference Tomczuk2016).
Bernhard and Kubik’s influential account describes how these official memory regimes emerge, but not how they sustain and actively govern memory. More recent theoretical frameworks on agency and collective memory have revisited this “sticky ‘problem of structure and agency’” (Wüstenberg Reference Wüstenberg2020, 11), with Wüstenberg and Sierp (Reference Wüstenberg and Sierp2020) advocating for an epistemology embedded in relational sociology that “highlights agency and practice—and that can also account for the maintenance and transformation of structure” (Wüstenberg Reference Wüstenberg2020, 15). Zoltan Dujisin (Reference Dujisin, Wüstenberg and Sierp2020) draws on Bourdieuan field theory to contend with the original structure–agency problem and makes a useful distinction between mnemonic processes of contestation and those of mnemonic identity/regimes. He suggests that “memory moves from struggle, contestation, and instability to a hard identity that projects sameness, permanence, and homogeneity” (2020, 25). Introducing this process-to-identity movement clarifies my current inquiry about the reverse identity-on-process conditioning that a memory regime (i.e., identity) has on memory struggles and contestation. While a process-to-identity inquiry may have to contend with issues of selection and negotiation, my identity-on-process inquiry into the way regime structures condition the space for contestation must contend with representation and the space for dissent.
I draw on Mouffe’s (Reference Mouffe2005; Reference Mouffe2013) conceptualization of the ineradicable antagonistic essence of “the political” to distinguish between Bernhard and Kubik’s unified and pillarized memory regimes as mnemonic orders different in kind rather than in degree. While unified memory regimes are posited on consensus and are at risk of exacerbating antagonism, pillarized ones are posited on pluralism and are more conducive to agonism, differences that become particularly prominent in the face of mnemonic contestation at the societal level. Antagonistic spaces cultivate “enemies” (on a friend/enemy logic) while agonistic spaces yield political adversaries with mutually acknowledged, legitimate claims to political representation.
Mouffe (Reference Mouffe2005, 9) envisions “the political” as a space of “power, conflict and antagonism […]Footnote 3 constitutive of human societies,” and “charges” our modern democratic orders not with “eliminating” this antagonism through positing an artificial consensus that denies the essence of the political, but with recognizing antagonism and dissent and sublimating it (21) by building agonistic spaces that embrace plurality. Following this conceptualization, I argue that pillarized memory regimes, as presented by Bernhard and Kubik, recognize and sublimate antagonism at the official level, while unified regimes simply relegate tension to the societal level by proclaiming a consensus that stigmatizes antagonism instead of legitimizing it. Consensus-driven memory regimes by definition leave no space for the political representation of dissent, and in doing so they may stigmatize dissent, turn dissenters into enemies, and ultimately risk antagonism and more violent mnemonic fractures. Marginalized narratives about the past, I propose, are thus a systemic side effect of official unified memory regimes. Either because of a prevailing consensus about the past, the perceived risks of politicizing the past, or the political costs of starting mnemonic battles (Bernhard and Kubik Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014, 17–18), political actors in unified memory regimes prefer consensus and unity to representation of the polity on mnemonic issues. Pillarized regimes, on the other hand, tolerate different interpretations of the past, even where they may not be fully represented at the official level.
This priming on either consensus or plurality is what makes unified and pillarized memory regimes different in kind. While societal dissent and competing accounts about the past do not existentially challenge pillarized memory regimes, they may lead to regime-threatening fractures in unified ones. In other words, unified regimes are threatened by marginalized accounts of the past, while pillarized regimes are threatened by mnemonic warriors with hegemonic accounts of the past trying to shatter the order of memory which is plural. To a unified regime, a marginalized account of the past is dangerous and unintelligible; to a pillarized one it is an account not represented, potentially unsettling but not defying of the regime’s essence or nature.
Unified Memory Regimes and Mnemonic Tension
While pillarized regimes structurally incorporate disagreement and difference, unified memory regimes conceal such tensions and relegate them to a nonofficial societal level where antagonism is pitted against consensus. Unified memory regimes, I argue, structure the rational and affective order of political spaces in ways that both order and discipline societal actors and their mnemonic grievances through an imperative of consensus and unity, setting the discursive and performative standards for public engagement on issues of memory. This order of sentiment goes beyond the invocation of certain affective dispositions (Bieberstein Reference Bieberstein2016) into conditioning the space of sympathy, solidarity, or aversion. Unified memory regimes are not simply mnemonic “agreements” posited on unity at the official level and among political actors, but they are also sustaining structures of meaning-making that govern the space of remembrance by shaping public judgment and sentiment toward the past as consensual, and by conditioning how agents at the societal level engage in mnemonic battles. This mnemonic governance relies on discursive and performative practicing of semantic concord by politicians and other actors in the public sphere. In unified regimes, “peace” at the official level does not foreclose mnemonic battles at the societal level where warriors, pluralists, and abnegators position themselves toward both the unified memory regime and one another. Mnemonic actors at the societal level are actors that take positions on a mnemonic battle—their agency manifesting as they engage in these episodes of memory contestation.
Drawing on Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2019), I trace the performative and discursive manifestation of unified regimes as structurers of affective and moral judgment that conceal tension. The assuaging of semantic tension is a political investment that cannot be explained only by reference to coercion or dissimulation (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005).Footnote 4 In Wedeen’s account of ideology as form, citizens have instead a single self with ambivalent feelings and thoughts, one that copes with reality and tries to make sense of its tensions within an ideologically defined semantic field of meaning-making. The function of ideology “as structuring reality is itself generative of further tensions, incoherencies, contradictions, and instances of uneven saturation—all the complexities and intensities that presuppose the political smoothing work needed for reproduction to continue” (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019, 7). Wedeen’s account of ideology not only manages to make intelligible ambivalence, (in)action, desire, affection, (de)attachment, “ordinary moments of disavowal,” and the paralysis of judgment; it also manages to attribute to the structure of political meaning-making what has been traditionally attributed to other forces (and disciplines) dealing with the societal and personal level. For instance, Wedeen traces the use of disavowal as a mechanism of self-assuagement to rationalize inaction from citizens ambivalent about the Assad regime in Syria—a tension ingrained in a syntax of disavowal of “I know very well, yet nevertheless …”Footnote 5 Mass sentimentality and mobilization of affective attachments then soothe remaining tensions, conditioning their articulation. For Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2019, 107), “mass sentimentality comes with a sense of (implicit or explicit) moral assertion, which […] complicates possibilities for political judgment so necessary for ideology critique” (emphasis in original). Sentimentality not only facilitates the soothing work of ideologies, but it also helps in their sustenance by foreclosing ideological critique.
The heuristic of ideology as form is particularly effective for understanding unified memory regimes because they soothe semantic tensions through their avowedly consensual nature. As mnemonic tension becomes unintelligible at the official level, tension is relegated to the societal, interpersonal, or intrapersonal levels. While many societal actors view anti-regime societal warriors through an antagonistic frame as “enemies” and discursively treat them as such, consensus-seeking mnemonic pluralists instead use their discursive deliberative practices as tension soothers, reflexively shielding the unified memory regime from potential challenges from below.
Mnemonic Pluralists in Unified Memory Regimes
Mnemonic pluralists recognize different interpretations of the past, favor agreement on fundamentals of mnemonic politics, and practice respect and tolerance toward various accounts of the past (Bernhard and Kubik Reference Bernhard and Kubik2014, 13). Because of these commitments, pluralists favor pillarized mnemonic regimes that resemble agonistic orders. Within these spaces of plurality that valorize difference, pluralists seem to emerge as structural-discursive agents with a commitment toward both the space of plurality in accommodating different visions of the past (structural imperative), and a signature deliberative rhetoric that exemplifies such commitment and sustains the essence of pillarized regimes (discursive practices). Within such regimes, pluralists perform maintenance work to sustain an order that reflects their worldview.
In contrast, pluralists are not really “at home” within unified memory regimes. Episodes of societal contestation in unified official memory regimes, I argue, present pluralists with an alignment dilemma that goes to the core of their structural commitment to the nature of political space and to the form of debate rather than its content: a challenge or opportunity to grapple with their structural commitment to plurality. If they fall into the trap of deploying their typical deliberative rhetoric predicated on affirming and reconciling competing views while losing sight of their structural imperative to pillarization, pluralists manifest three regime-sustaining discursive behaviors/practices: (1) semantic alignment with consensus, (2) a syntax of disavowal of the attempted fractures that preserves consensus-seeking hierarchies, and (3) the particularization of competing societal narratives, allowing the “consensus” view to retain its claims to universality. I further argue that pluralists are most likely to manifest these discursive behaviors within underspecified unified memory regimes, in which the consensus on underspecification is more easily disguised as plurality.
Traps of Consensus in Unified Memory Regimes
I propose semantic alignment as a heuristic that best captures political agreement on the main dimensions of debate within a memory regime. Inspired by the recent work of Mihaela Mihai (Reference Mihai2022) and her problematization of overdetermination of guilt and responsibility in collective memory, I reimagine guilt determination on a spectrum that oscillates from overspecification on the one end to underspecification on the other. Overspecification of guilt means, for example, thinking of the world in terms of a stark division between victims and perpetrators, taking inspiration from legal imagination and transitional justice, and being unable to comprehend the “messy middle” where compliance, complicity, and shades of gray reside. I suggest that underspecification is the opposite trend: an underspecification of guilt means emphasizing the messy middle and the difficulty of discerning victims from perpetrators in regimes that relied on this conflation to control and implicate people. I argue that memory regimes can be located on this spectrum, and that unified memory regimes will semantically tend toward one or the other extreme. Neither underspecification nor overspecification are simply the natural order of the past: they are consequences of how a memory regime orders the space of remembrance. Agents semantically align with a unified memory regime when they align with a regime’s consensus on this spectrum. Pluralists may be more likely to fall into the trap of semantically aligning with an underspecified unified memory regime, because they will have a harder time recognizing underspecification as consensus. Underspecification thrives on the blurriness of boundaries, making this order of the past appear to be a plural space of accommodation even in unified memory regimes. When underspecification disguises as pluralism, it highjacks pluralists’ natural tendencies toward complexity and appreciation for multiple perspectives.
On a syntax level, pluralists may practice the structure of disavowal, “I know very well, yet nevertheless …” as conceptualized by Wedeen (Reference Wedeen2019), or employ a similar syntax of “yes, but …” as opposed to an alternative syntax that could retain tension without disavowal such as a “yes, and …” structure. The syntax of disavowal appears to acknowledge pluralism yet retains a semantic alignment—a tension embedded within the structure of sentences or paragraphs that “resolves” within the same space. The function of the “yes, but” is to structure an order in which what follows the “but” subsumes the competing narrative. The part of the sentence following “but” semantically prevails and becomes the only actionable statement. Thus, “yes, but …” acknowledges competing statements, confronts them only to preserve the hierarchy of narratives in favor of the dominant narrative, and reinforces semantic alignment with the unified memory regime.
Finally, in line with both semantic alignment and a syntax of disavowal, reconciliatory pluralist speech within unified memory regimes may try to square the competing narrative within a consensus-seeking framework. If the unified memory regime and competing narrative are irreconcilable in some way, consensus seeking will prompt pluralists to solve this tension by recognizing yet particularizing the competing narrative. Accordingly, challenging societal mnemonic warriors and their narratives emerge as particular, isolated exceptions to the dominant universal consensus of the unified memory regime. While a regime-threatening discourse may find a language to convey its reality, classifying its narrative as particular precludes its political claim to disrupt that established consensus in favor of pillarization. While semantic alignment serves to retain a political order of meaning-making, narrative disavowal and particularization serve to order agents and their narratives in ways that discipline the narrative space in favor of reconciliation and consensus. Invoking mass sentimentality in line with the unified memory regime permeates the space of these discursive practices.
A Unified Official Memory Regime in Albania
Albania has suffered from an inconsequential, delayed, and inconsistent transitional justice process, which has discursively underspecified the memory field on guilt and responsibility.Footnote 6 High recycling of the communist political elite—primarily through the Socialist Party (the communist successor party), but also through the leadership of the Democratic Party (the anticommunists)—encouraged the deflection of meaningful attempts at transitional justice, with electoral considerations often driving the process (Austin Reference Austin, Stan and Nedelsky2015; Austin and Ellison Reference Austin, Ellison and Stan2008; Godole Reference Godole, Hoeres and Knabe2023). Not only have the formerly persecutedFootnote 7 found themselves facing their persecutors in new positions of power and authority (Tufa Reference Tufa2011), they have also lacked political representation and articulation of their grievances, with the Democratic Party failing to properly act on their quest for truth and justice, despite their nominal role as opponents of the old communist regime.Footnote 8 When the Vaçe episode was unfolding, collective remembrance in Albania had paid little attention to former prisons and forced labor and internment camps,Footnote 9 while a new wave of commemoration and exoticization of the partisan movement and the Anti-Fascist War (see Pandelejmoni Reference Pandelejmoni, Godole and Danaj2015) was emerging with the 2013 electoral victory of the Socialist Party.
The lack of a coherent transitional justice process and of an ethics of remembrance (see Booth [Reference Booth2001] on memory as “a face of justice”) along with a memory contract founded on amnesty and amnesia (see Brendese Reference Brendese2014) complicated the space of moral judgment and remembrance in the case of Albania (Amy Reference Amy2021; Fijalkowski Reference Fijalkowski2015) and promoted a “forgive and forget” mindset spearheaded by the political elite. The official memory field on guilt and responsibility coalesced around former Democratic president Sali Berisha’s words, expressed in 1992, that “[w]e are all guilty, we all jointly suffered” (Austin and Ellison Reference Austin, Ellison and Stan2008, 182). This centripetal push toward the gray area of responsibility gave way to a political imagination of all society as “victims and accomplices” (Godole Reference Godole, Hoeres and Knabe2023, 237), a de facto moral amnesty that harmed the intelligibility of the grievances of the formerly persecuted and concealed the scale of their suffering under the dictatorship.
This “memory contract” at the official level defined a highly underspecified memory field on guilt and responsibility. The expansion of the “messy middle” to encompass the whole space of victimhood and responsibility emphasized regime coercion, the ubiquity of violence, and the narrow space for agency under dictatorships. While overspecification errs on the side of moral dualism, underspecification errs on the side of moral relativism. In the case of Albania, in 2014 the memory field was underspecified,Footnote 10 with responsibility being simultaneously shared among everyone and no one. Footnote 11 This obfuscation harmed anew those who were victimized the most by the regime, while a reconciliatory approach benefited the rest who could more easily forgive and forget.
A Unified Memory Regime Governing Artistic Heritage
The unified memory regime governing communist-era artistic heritage upon Vaçe’s death in 2014 was therefore part of an underspecified memory field. Underspecification manifested in two distinct yet interconnected ways: on the position of the cultural elite vis-à-vis the communist regime, and on the political nature of art produced during this period. Underspecification promoted an official celebratory consensus toward the artistic heritage and the artists of the communist period. At Vaçe’s state-sponsored funeral, Prime Minister Edi Rama, Minister of Culture Mirela Kumbaro, former president and former prime minister Berisha, opposition leader Lulzim Basha, and Speaker of Parliament Ilir Meta were united in their grief. They were hardly united otherwise, but heritage brought them together. Vaçe emerged in their condolences as a ray of light in the gloominess of the dictatorship, a beloved singer invoking nostalgia, and a unifying symbol of the nation (see Panorama Online 2014b). Prime Minster Rama recalled his personal tender memories of her voice and songs, claiming that Vaçe would have “electrified the skies of the whole world” in another place and time (Rama Reference Rama2014), acknowledging the constraints of the Albanian dictatorship.
My interviews with the cultural elite point to the same underspecification. Artists from the communist era centered coercion, party control, the ubiquity of fear and violence, and the impossibility of dissent when discussing their positions vis-à-vis the regime. They recognized issues of privilege, social status, and regime legitimization, but channeled them through lenses of inevitability, lack of agency, instrumentalization by the dictatorship, and the high quality of art under communism.Footnote 12 Thus, as the narrative goes, artists were rightly respected, promoted, and privileged by the regime, and only share responsibility for it to the same extent as everyone else. Nuance as to how choices to support or dissent differently distributed costs and benefits to artists are unintelligible in the prevailing narrative. Coercion foreclosed agency.
Drawing on Nicholas Tochka’s foundational work on Albania, I trace how a coercion-centric understanding of the relationship of the cultural elite to the communist state and the socialist realist canon limits comprehension of how the ideo-aesthetic order in communist Albania was cultivated. Communist-era artistic space in Albania experienced a complex cocktail of autonomy, coercion, incentivization, experimentation, privileging, and disciplining (Tochka Reference Tochka2016). As the communist state moved through several phases of development (see the compelling periodization[s] in Bejko Reference Bejko, Bon and Musaraj2021; Mëhilli Reference Mëhilli2017; Tochka Reference Tochka2016), the prescriptive nature of socialist realism as the ideological blueprint for how art ought to look, feel, and sound was built, cultivated, and negotiated through a delicate dance between the cultural field and its relation to and embodiment of power within the socialist state. Tochka’s (Reference Tochka2016) work on music production, for example, traces how the state effectively moved from coercion as its primary strategy of control to more “productive” symbolic-ideological approaches starting in the early 1960s. He traces cultural field-defining “battles” where winning Soviet and Eastern Bloc-educated artistic elites helped to consolidate an “expert ideo-aesthetic language;” the targeting of light music as “a domain for administration;” the emergence of a thematic, aesthetic, and interpretation spirit for the “spiritual demands of our masses;” and “the consecration of models of composition and performance” through the practices of endorsement, evaluation, and devaluation of festival songs (Reference Tochka2016, 65–72).
More than a regime-mandated ideo-symbolic order, audible socialist realism emerged as an ideo-symbolic order constituted and negotiated through and with the cultural field. Rather than a governance principle, coercion was more of a high-level corrective and marker of tectonic shifts in the political winds. As creative work during communism embodied the “irreducible duality of all cultural production” that required both individual creativity and “labor of social utility” for the masses, the control and independence of creative work were “not mutually contradictory but must be pursued simultaneously” (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005, 12, citing Arnol’dov et al. Reference Arnol’dov1984, 162, 163). Socialist realism emerged as a complex space of cultivation and negotiation within the cultural field itself as much as between the cultural field and the communist regime in Tirana.
Music production became central to this emerging ideo-symbolic order because of its particular ability to signal the boundaries of ideo-aesthetic permissibility through the popular annual Festival of Song, one of the most important artistic events in communist Albania. The Festival of Song became a laboratory for the building and negotiation of the audible socialist realist canon. Debuting in 1962, the festival cultivated a distinctly popular music genre, light songs, and quickly became a space of artistic and ideological scrutiny on form, content, performance, scenography, awards, clothes, hair, facial expression, gestures, and degree of enthusiasm. It also became a space that governed popularity, incentives, privileges, professionalization, propriety, culturedness, rises and falls from grace, standards, and status within the cultural field (Tochka Reference Tochka2016; Reference Tochka2017). The mid-1960s saw the start of the cultural revolution in Albania, with both the Party and the League of Writers and Artists mobilizing to stiffen the ideological space of music production. The famous “Waltz of Happiness” (Valsi i lumturisë) debuted in the 1965 Festival of Song,Footnote 13 and was embedded in the revolutionary and field-defining dynamics of music production in communist Albania.Footnote 14
The Obfuscation of Ideology: Where Does Socialist Realism Reside?
On the second dimension of the political nature of art produced during communism, underspecification took a particular shape, narrowing “the political” in art to mean overt political symbols only. Overt symbols could be removed, edited, or altered during postcommunism. Vehbiu (Reference Vehbiu2015) succinctly called this approach an “exorcism of identifiers, starting with Hoxha’s name and face” (emphasis added). Once so sanitized, according to the prevailing narrative, art had been depoliticized and could be relegated to the space of art alone as opposed to its original dual nature as art and propaganda. This approach, as I demonstrate below, failed to recognize the more encompassing political dimensions of socialist realism, an underspecification that precluded collective understanding of how this heritage retained the political traces of the past.
With the fall of the communist dictatorship, Albania needed to decide how to approach the art produced during the dictatorship. Through archival sources I traced the deliberations of two key working groups that reviewed public-facing art. The two working groups reached similar narrow conclusions as to where “the political” resided and how to make this art acceptable for a public transitioning away from communism. For instance, the 1994 discussion about showing communist-era movies conducted by the Governing Council of Albanian Radio-Television, the national TV broadcaster, considered as politicized those movies that explicitly mentioned the Anti-Fascist War, Communist Party, class struggle, or Hoxha, and whose central subject revolved around such issues. The discussions point to few movies being entirely politicized as per their criteria while others needed only slight revision to edit out explicit mentions of the Party, ideology, class, and so forth. The rest were deemed apolitical and timeless and safe to broadcast.Footnote 15 During the same period, the Ministry of Culture faced pressure to “deal with” the triumphalist communist-era mosaic on the façade of the National Historical Museum. The working group composed of architects, historians, and artists, including one of the mosaic’s creators, recognized the political nature of the mosaic in its entirety, but opted only to remove the two main red stars and to alter the red book representing the works of Enver Hoxha.Footnote 16 Another intervention to review the mosaic more holistically was contemplated, but never completed.Footnote 17 Freed from its overt political symbols, the mosaic remained preserved for posterity.
Beyond the explicit political regime lexicon, or overt symbolism, there is an ideological lexicon that these institutional actions failed to address. Although the ideological repertoire of artistic heritage retains its socialist coding, underspecification impedes its collective legibility as political. Like the broader socialist realist canon (Dobrenko Reference Dobrenko and Savage2007; Golomstock Reference Golomstock1990; Robin Reference Robin1992) that experienced experimentation, negotiation, coercion, and more prescriptive stages with variation across place and time, in Albania socialist realism as a state-mandated ideo-aesthetic tradition resided in a three-dimensional space of form, content, and sentiment, cultivated and negotiated within the cultural field and its intersections with the communist regime. In my interviews, cultural elites tended to focus on the canon at its most prescriptive, paralleling the ways in which they centered coercion in their narratives of the era. For them, “realist in form” meant that art could not be abstract, absurd, or surrealist, but follow the realist tradition. Content limited the subject matter to socialism, with themes like the partisan movement and the war, the “new human” (njeriu i ri), industrialization, modernization, the “positive hero,” love at the factory, socialist motherhood, and the new life blossoming in the beautiful fatherland. Pro-regime sentiment permeated the works of the era, either in the pathos of winning wars and defeating fascism, imperialism, and defending the fatherland, or in the lyricism of socialist life, conveyed through the warmth of tunes in songs and colors on canvases. People under Albanian socialism had a moral duty to experience happy, cheerful, meaningful lives, a sentiment that art had to engender and cultivate. It is this sentimental dimension that made the broadcasting of Vaçe’s “Waltz of Happiness” in a communist prison a particularly effective tool of torture. Form, content, and sentiment in combination made socialist artworks distinct, with ideological symbolism permeating their material, ideational, and creative space. Therefore, an underspecified unified memory regime that acknowledged only overt regime symbolism (content) to be political while neglecting form and sentiment rendered illegible the multidimensionality of communist-era art and the ways in which it reinforced the political order, along with particular associations and affective dispositions it triggered for certain people.
Audible Legacies in Albania: Vaçe’s Monumentality
Vaçe was no stranger to the contemporary soundscape of postcommunist Albania, with her voice and songs serving different needs for communist and postcommunist generations. I argue that Vaçe’s versatility is central to her monumentality, a versatility enabled by the dual underspecification of the unified memory regime. For communist-era generations, Vaçe triggers nostalgia by representing the audible space of their youth, a reflective nostalgia (Boym Reference Boym2001) typical of those who lived through an era and have personal memories associated with it. For postcommunist generations—many of whom emigrated abroad—her audible legacy and the transition-era revival of her songs triggers homeland nostalgia. In Boym’s (Reference Boym2001) categorization, this resembles restorative nostalgia, allowing the homeland to be discovered anew. As Vaçe’s songs are recognizable to multiple generations of Albanian speakers, her musical legacy inhabits a space of authoritative monumentality.
Vaçe was the sweetheart of the music production sector and a beloved singer of communist Albania. If communism in Albania had a sound, it was Vaçe’s voice. Her ascent to unmatched popularity in the early 1960s coincided with the ascent to power within the cultural field of the new Soviet-educated music composers and the emergence of the expert ideo-aesthetic language (Tochka Reference Tochka2016). Tochka (Reference Tochka2017) demonstrates how Vaçe’s voice, performance, and persona became the embodiment of audible “cultured” socialism, a trendsetter emulated by later socialist-era singers, and an icon of affective labor. Not only was Vaçe a singer of great talent, she also possessed a particular type of voice, professional and scenic intuition, and posture that made her a pioneer of “the declarative-heroic mode, using her arms, hands and shoulders to punctuate the grand songs on significant political and nationalist themes she became best known for performing” (Reference Tochka2017, 297).
The postcommunist Vaçe cult grew after the first decade of transition, once the euphoria around Western songs (predominantly in Italian and English) dissipated, resulting in a diverse audio space of foreign, regional (Balkan), and local music. A nostalgia for Vaçe and her socialist aesthetics had already started to emerge among middle-aged people in late socialism, while the tastes of the Albanian late-socialist youth were being cultivated through the Italian and Yugoslav radio waves and TV (Tochka Reference Tochka2016, 135–36; on Italian radio waves and TV, see also Mai Reference Mai2001). Transition was marked by new modes of valorization that saw the socialist professional artistic class uncomfortably give space to an order of music production, expression, transgression, emulation, and circulation being shaped by foreign inspirations, the emerging market economy, and new imperatives of freedom that, according to Tochka (Reference Tochka2016), were also voiced through light music.
The revival of Vaçe’s songs was part of the rediscovery of Albanian local music, a revisiting of the Albanian twentieth-century music tradition in search of a sense of belonging, and a reflection of the homesickness of millions of Albanians who left for the West after 1991. Vaçe’s songs featured prominently in Klan TV’s festival 100 Songs of the Century (100 Këngët e Shekullit), rebranded as Songs of the Century (Këngët e Shekullit)—a popular festival series in which contemporary artists sung covers of twentieth-century popular Albanian songs. Këngët e Shekullit also featured an exclusive interview with Vaçe, living in Switzerland at the time (RTV Klan 2014).
Vaçe’s monumental status grew stronger through the two decades of Top Channel’s End of the Year Song feature. Top Channel, one of the main Albanian national TV stations, started a popular tradition of end-of-the-year songs in 2001. Mimicking USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” every December the Top Channel End of the Year Song featured all Top Channel employees singing a cover of a famous international or Albanian song. In 2001, they debuted with Queen’s “We Are the Champions” (Top Channel Albania 2017a), followed by USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” in 2002 (Top Channel Albania 2017b). Twenty subsequent years covered an Albanian song, with Vaçe’s songs appearing six times, most recently in 2021.Footnote 18 Vaçe’s repertoire was by far the most featured in the End of the Year Song covers.
Many of these songs’ lyrics have a patriotic flavor, given the socialist brand of nationalism Albania embarked on during its communist dictatorship. Patriotism in Hoxhaist Albania built on precommunist nation-building efforts (Fischer Reference Fischer and Sugar1995; Sulstarova Reference Sulstarova2015) and developed them through modernization, mass literacy, and homogenization efforts through cultural hegemony (Abazi and Doja Reference Abazi and Doja2016; Bardhoshi and Lelaj Reference Bardhoshi and Lelaj2018; Lelaj Reference Lelaj2015). It cultivated a discourse of national consolidation and love of the homeland manifested in the 1970s through an inward turn toward tradition and folk music. Folk music was especially promoted once the state cracked down on what it considered to be “foreign shows/influences/manifestations” in art and music, starting with the 11th Festival of Song in 1972.Footnote 19 Most of the songs Top Channel (2017c; 2017d; 2017f; 2017g; 2021) chose from Vaçe’s repertoire have a national-patriotic flavor, as she sings about the beauty of the (socialist) homeland (“O Beautiful Arbëri,” “Waltz of Happiness”), its nurturing of life (“In Our Home”), and its perseverance through storms and invasions (“Flows in Songs and Verses,” “For You Fatherland”).
The 2010 Top Channel edition featuring “O Beautiful Arbëri,” a song evoking feelings of patriotism and longing for the homeland, was a tribute to both Vaçe and to the iconic artist living abroad. The cover song video starts with a snippet of Vaçe’s original video in black and white and then shows her in old age holding a small present wrapped in red paper (Top Channel Albania 2017g, 0:05). The video then takes the viewer to present-day Top Channel studios where employees sing her song. The cover video returns to Vaçe at the end, tracing the red-wrapped present traveling on a train from Switzerland (where Vaçe emigrated) all the way to the hands of a child in Albania, who then joins a chorus of singing children (2017g, 4:32). Toward the end, Vaçe appears in an emotional moment saying that “it is a beautiful feeling to listen to one’s songs sung by young people who have never seen one perform” (2017g, 3:49). The narrative of the cover video flatters both the youth nostalgia of those born under communism as well as the homeland nostalgia of those who left Albania at various points during transition, proposing Vaçe as a cross-generational unifying popular symbol. The video also conveys the preservation of Vaçe’s audible legacy through the emotionally charged chorus of children who received the present arriving from Switzerland directly from a now grandmotherly Vaçe. Not only is Vaçe sad and moved in the interview, she conveys the sentimentality of the artist in exile, forced to leave the homeland because of the violent transition, lack of opportunities, and other problems that evoke the discourse around Albania’s massive postcommunist emigration wave.
Through the popular End of the Year Song episodes, Top Channel facilitated the transformation of Vaçe from a communist-era singer into a timeless singer, repurposing her songs for the current emotional needs of the young and old, those living in Albania, and those abroad. It facilitated her songs’ transition from old communist-era radio and black-and-white TV into the colorful screens of postcommunism, from her vocal cords into the singing of Top Channel employees, and from an association with the communist period into a transcendent rebranding for a homesick audience.
Lubonja’s Critique: Challenging a Unified Memory Regime
In a lengthy newspaper article, Fatos Lubonja (Reference Lubonja2014a), a former political prisoner of the Hoxha regime and a renowned public intellectual and critic of postcommunist politics,Footnote 20 took issue with the state and public tribute to Vaçe’s passing and the celebratory sentiment of her legacy, accompanying his critique with an imaginary letter from hell that Dictator Hoxha wrote to the Socialist prime minister Rama and the former prime minister, president, and longtime leader of the Democratic Party, Berisha. In this imaginary letter, Hoxha is touched and proud of both postcommunist leaders, praising them for uniting for this occasion and for their efforts to honor the communist dictatorship’s heritage and its People’s Artists. This imaginary letter accompanying Lubonja’s critique of the celebration of Vaçe’s legacy is meant to denounce the official consensus on celebrating Albania’s communist-era artistic heritage. Lubonja imagines Hoxha to particularly appreciate Rama’s heartfelt nostalgic eulogy to Vaçe. The imaginary Hoxha further expects Rama—a painter, former mayor of Tirana, and son of the beloved communist-era sculptor Kristaq Rama—to “fix the mistakes” regarding the memory of Hoxha himself, insinuating a hope for absolution.
In his critique accompanying the imaginary letter, Lubonja criticized the de facto state funeral and the public sentiment that celebrated Vaçe’s legacy. He pointed out that Vaçe’s legacy was inseparable from the communist state, with her songs—the “Waltz of Happiness” in particular—played in prisons and labor camps as mechanisms of torture and oppression. Indeed, Vaçe’s rhythmic songs embraced the regime’s ideology of the “new human,” blossoming youth, love stories in cooperatives and factories, the happiness of people in socialist countries, the prosperity of the farming fields, and the socialist fatherland, covering tropes across the communist lexicon. In both form and substance, these songs were celebratory, joyous, and aggressively positive. For prisoners, these songs became a violent aesthetic. Lubonja discussed the torture of such happy songs about life in the communist fatherland being broadcast through Radio Tirana to suffering political prisoners at Burreli Prison. For Lubonja, this epitomized the lived dystopia of thousands of intellectuals, artists, clergy, and ordinary anti-regime citizens being forced to listen to propaganda music about the happy fatherland. He asks, “Can you imagine them [prisoners], in Burreli cells, reduced to animals of forced labor, singing with great spiritual and aesthetic pleasure ‘… along with Spring you also blossom …’ [a line from the ‘Waltz of Happiness’]?” (Lubonja Reference Lubonja2014a).
For Lubonja, this torturous legacy calls into question the iconic status of socialist realism’s art and artists in Albania and the celebratory sentiment that accompanies them. He further argued that Vaçe’s songs were not representative of the musical tastes of late-socialist youth. Instead, this young generation despised the conformist Albanian art of the time (he called it “banal”) and secretly listened to prohibited Western songs. Finally, Lubonja claimed that Nexhmije Hoxha’s public and unchallenged nostalgia testified to the inappropriately unconditional honoring of the art and artists of the communist period after the regime fell. As a memory warrior, Lubonja aimed at fracturing a unified memory regime that venerated art and artists from the communist period.
Although critics were quick to accuse Lubonja of desecrating Vaçe’s memory and of demanding that beloved songs be banned, Lubonja himself never asked for such measures. His critique extended only to the celebratory nature of nostalgia for these songs, the postcommunist state’s involvement in Vaçe’s public commemoration, the unity of politicians on the matter, and the overall lack of public reflection on the open and subtle violences of this heritage. Earlier, Lubonja (Reference Lubonja2007) had also stated that “I am by no means of the idea that these songs should disappear from the earth, nor that they should not be heard. They should be preserved and heard (just as they were sung) because they help to understand that time.” Instead, it is their naïvely nostalgic revival by young singers at new song festivals that Lubonja takes issue with.Footnote 21 With few voices publicly supporting Lubonja (see, for instance, Açka Reference Açka2014), he subsequently published an article 13 days after the first (Reference Lubonja2014b) claiming that he was being burned at the stake for desecration—an intentional reference to heretics and the Inquisition.
Mnemonic Enemies, Nostalgia, and the Invisibility of Socialist Aesthetics
In line with the unified memory regime’s consensus imperative exacerbating antagonism at the societal level and casting those presenting competing accounts of the past as enemies, in this section I focus on defensive mnemonic warriors in society and their harsh critique of Lubonja. The Albanian artistic community of the communist and postcommunist period took issue with Lubonja’s “politicization” of Vaçe’s songs and his claim that she legitimized the communist regime through her art and talent. Politicization was a framework they saw Lubonja impose on songs rather than a quality that the songs inherently preserved. Prominent postcommunist Albanian singer and Vaçe fan Aurela Gaçe (Reference Gaçe2014) went so far as to compare Lubonja to a high officer of Hitler’s army, and suggested that Lubonja consider shooting himself like Hitler did.
Defensive mnemonic warriors engaged in the debate with arguments that coalesced around the following logic: Vaçe sang about universal topics and dimensions of life beyond political symbolism and her talent transcended the dictatorship in which she, like everyone else, was trapped (see responses in Gazeta Shqiptare reported by Nikolli [Reference Nikolli2014a; Reference Nikolli2014b]). They saw her iconic status and the nostalgia she triggered across generations as a testimony to her timelessness and representativeness, and as an argument to legitimize the ascent of a communist icon to a postcommunist national symbol. Gaçe (Reference Gaçe2014), in one of the harshest public responses, asked: “[H]ow is the song about the grandmother related to the Party? […] Did your grandmother ever caress you? Because it is impossible to listen to [Vaçe’s] interpretation and not remember your own grandmother. And the song about her first child? […] [A]nd those simply talking about the flirtation of love, like ‘Lenza’ [Hiccups] or ‘Djaloshi dhe shiu’ [The Boy and the Rain]?” The Albanian artistic community mobilized around similar sentiments of hurtfulness and disrespect, pointing to the familiar, intimate, innocent nature of Vaçe’s songs and how they reminded people of simpler times in their lives, devoid of politics. Echoing a sentiment that Prime Minister Rama shared in his eulogy (Panorama Online 2014a), these artists lamented that Vaçe’s great talent had been confined to Albania because of the dictatorship, demonstrating how Vaçe, like other talented people, was also a victim of the regime that she sustained through her art. These underspecified arguments recalled the messy middle of victimhood and perpetration, in line with the prevailing semantics of the unified memory regime.
Lubonja was thus guilty of three sins in the eyes of these defensive mnemonic warriors. First, he misidentified Vaçe’s innocent, mundane songs as socialist propaganda. Propaganda meant only overtly political content—the presence or absence of a narrow socialist lexicon such as the Party, the revolution, and the Anti-Fascist War—and could not possibly include or extend to everyday life under socialism. Second, by critiquing Vaçe’s legacy, Lubonja ascribed direct blame to her personally for engaging in propaganda through her art, while in reality she was a victim confined to Albania like other artists of the time. Third, Lubonja sought to deprive common citizens of their youthful memories, of their family stories, of the dance parties and the love encounters of their parents and of themselves, of a nostalgia for a time that was no more. For these Lubonja critics, their affectionate and intimate relationship with Vaçe’s songs transcended socialist realism’s connection to state violence and oppression during communism, and the exercise of such violence on prisoners like Lubonja. It is no accident that these critics married moral assertion with sentimental nuance: nostalgia, childhood or youth, family, parents, everyday life during socialism, Vaçe as a ray of light in the gloom of dictatorship. Lubonja’s account was nuclear, systemically challenging, personally hurtful to a mnemonic consensus around which Albanians had built a celebratory narrative. He was an enemy to the remembering collective.
Pluralists and the Order of Memory
Mnemonic pluralists played a mediating role in this fierce debate and in doing so reinforced the unified memory regime. While defensive mnemonic warriors challenge offensive warriors through antagonistic disbelief, mnemonic pluralists perform a more effective disciplining function by engaging in soothing work through semantic alignment, disavowal, and juxtaposition of narratives. In Lubonja’s case, as pluralists tried to bring nuance to the debate, they pitted his narrative against the consensus-driven official unified memory regime and challenged the right of his “particular” lived experience to reorder the space of celebratory collective remembrance.
My analysis focuses on two important pluralist critiques of Lubonja, those of Silvana Toska (Reference Toska2014) and Andrea Stefani (Reference Stefani2014). Both engage meaningfully with Lubonja’s points and recognize his suffering, and thus represent “hard” cases to show that even moderate, thoughtful, and appreciating responses solidified the status quo of a unified official memory regime that celebrates and rhetorically depoliticizes the artistic heritage from the communist dictatorship. Toska, an academic living abroad, pointed out that Vaçe’s songs reminded common citizens of happier, simpler times and reminded her generation of their happy late-socialist childhoods. Albanians’ sincere nostalgia deserved celebratory sentiment and could not be reduced to infantility or support for the regime. Stefani, a renowned journalist and editor, also defended Albanians’ nostalgia and affection for Vaçe as a natural appreciation for her and her songs, separating peoples’ relation to the art of the dictatorship from the dictatorship itself. As opposed to the mnemonic warriors, these mnemonic pluralists used typical pluralist deliberative rhetoric, sympathized with Lubonja’s suffering, and closely engaged with his arguments by raising difficult questions. Simultaneously, they appealed to consensus and the need for consensus, invoking and consolidating the semantic order of the unified memory regime through semantic alignment, a syntax of disavowal, and a template that distinguished the particular from the universal.
Semantic alignment reinforced the unified memory regime’s underspecification of both the positionality of artists in the dictatorship and the political dimensions of socialist realism. Both Toska (Reference Toska2014) and Stefani (Reference Stefani2014) reiterated the complexity of the relationships of socialist art with the communist dictatorship and derived from this an inability to ascribe blame or responsibility to artists for having supported the communist regime through their art, thus valorizing the trope of overlapping victimhood and complicity. Stefani initially entertained the possibility that artists might have a higher moral responsibility than others for having legitimized the regime, but then retreated to an “everyone is responsible” messy middle, typical of semantic alignment. Both also reiterated that Vaçe had no choice but to have her career in Albania, and at least alleviated the gloominess of the dictatorship through her art. Toska, for instance, claimed that both celebration and radical rejection of Vaçe were extreme stances, and that the truth is to be found somewhere in the middle. But instead of a structural challenge to the memory regime itself to move toward pillarization, she followed in semantic alignment with the unified memory regime’s “everyone is responsible” trope, arguing that it is difficult to ascribe blame to either Vaçe or to one’s parents or relatives, who all legitimized the system through “fear, ignorance, or sincere belief.”
In an analogous process of disavowal, Lubonja’s pluralist critics relied on a “yes, but” (po, por) syntax structure to challenge his account of Vaçe’s legacy. To paraphrase their main “yes, but” linguistic tropes:
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• Communism was violent and maybe sold a fake happiness, but so was the transition from communism and its promises (Stefani Reference Stefani2014; Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Vaçe may have upheld the system through her art, but her songs represented the life people thought they were living during communism, or were heading toward (Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Lubonja may have had the opportunity to listen to Western songs, but the rest of Albanians had access only to the local art scene, and their nostalgia is sincere (Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Vaçe may be the product and upholder of the communist system, but the art in the West, which Lubonja admired, is also embedded in its own reality and struggles (Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Some of Vaçe’s texts and songs may be banal, but so is the capitalist erotics disguised as music today (Toska Reference Toska2014); and mediocrity is found in art under liberal regimes too (Stefani Reference Stefani2014).
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• Vaçe may have upheld the system through her art, but her talent stands above the songs she sung (Stefani Reference Stefani2014; Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Vaçe may have upheld the system through her art, but there was little or no space for dissent (Stefani Reference Stefani2014; Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Vaçe may have upheld the system through her art, but so did everyone else, from workers to artists, family, and relatives, through sincere belief, fear, or coercion (Stefani Reference Stefani2014; Toska Reference Toska2014).
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• Vaçe’s songs may have been propaganda, but they served as a ray of light during those gloomy times (Stefani Reference Stefani2014).
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• Lubonja’s personal experience with communism may define his personal attitude toward this art, but the rest of peoples’ personal experiences also define their attitudes, enthusiasm, and judgment (Toska Reference Toska2014).
While in Wedeen’s (Reference Wedeen2019) account the use of disavowal assuages subjects’ moral tensions and preserves the regime’s status quo, in this episode in Albania, the “yes, but” syntax preserves the consensus of a predominantly favorable narrative toward socialist realist art and artists and justified celebratory attitudes. The function of the “yes, but” in Albania also structures a moral order in which the competing narrative is subsumed, or negated altogether, by what follows the “but.” The part of the sentence or paragraph following “but” semantically prevails, obscures what precedes it, and becomes the only actionable statement. It is the “winning” moral statement in a sense, as it acknowledges the preceding statement, but does not recognize its equal validity. “Yes, but” formally preserves tension while ultimately structuring a moral order that negates the competing narrative’s validity to affect the dominant collective attitudes toward remembrance and celebration.
This qualification of “validity” is central to discerning particular from representative narratives about the common past. While societal mnemonic warriors defending the unified memory regime antagonistically challenged the validity of Lubonja’s stance altogether, pluralists acknowledged his account while relegating it to a personal, particular truth. Even when all personal truths are considered valid, they are “competing” under structurally unequal conditions of a celebratory unified memory regime. A competing principle of representativeness, for instance, could hold that the accounts of the formerly persecuted should be amplified because of their disproportionate suffering, with the irreconcilability of marginalized accounts with consensus triggering a mnemonic regime change instead (toward pillarization). But such a competing principle is unintelligible in an underspecified memory field in which all are simultaneously victims, perpetrators, and accomplices. Particularization, then, is a discursive practice that forecloses legitimate claims to regime-disrupting representation.
Both Toska and Stefani acknowledged what torture it must have been for abused and starving political prisoners to listen to songs about the beautiful fatherland and the “Waltz of Happiness.” Toska (Reference Toska2014) noted that “it’s painful how detached the experience of political prisoners is from the rest of society, as it took Lubonja describing the prison scene for my friends and I to be shaken from our comfort today and reflect on the violence of dictatorial art.” Yet in another “yes, but” argument, after this initial sympathy Toska (Reference Toska2014) ultimately rejected Lubonja’s claim that this experience should influence how the rest of society approaches Vaçe’s art: “[B]ut, at the same time, the personal experiences of many others with Vaçe Zela are not tragic.” Toska argued that for many, Vaçe’s songs trigger nostalgia, remind them of happier times, remind her own generation of their naïve childhood, or provide a contrast for others of “someone with musical talent [Vaçe] against the capitalist erotics regarded as ‘music’ today.” Stefani recognized that “‘the People’ were ‘Us’” in whose name Lubonja was persecuted and had suffered, but stopped short of extending responsibility to “us” to nuance celebratory nostalgia because of these testimonies of trauma. As consensus is sought out as a universal, particularization of competing accounts is a systemic derivative.
Conclusions
Unified memory regimes are mnemonic orders posited on consensus at the official level, and prone to exacerbating public antagonism during memory contestations. Through a case of postcommunist heritage contestation in Albania, I illustrate the inability of such orders to guarantee agonistic spaces for memory contestation. Posited on consensus at the official level, unified memory regimes relegate tension to society at large, conditioning an antagonistic space of everyday mnemonic battles where warriors and pluralists continue to “fight.” The consensual imperative of the official unified memory regime not only orders the public repertoire of judgment and affection, but it also limits the ability to imagine alternative political “designs” for official memory regimes as more plural spaces that recognize difference as the order of memory. This regime-conditioned consensual imperative may engender particularly counterproductive discursive behaviors in pluralists, agents otherwise committed to plural public spaces and dissent. During episodes of societal contestation within unified memory regimes, practicing deliberation as a pluralist signature discourse without acknowledging the structurally unequal conditions that competing narratives face under unified memory regimes becomes a regime-sustaining practice. Pluralists may fall into three discursive traps: semantic alignment with the official consensus, a syntax of disavowal of fractures, and particularization of competing narratives. Pluralists may be more prone to uphold consensus in the face of attempted fractures in underspecified unified memory regimes in which underspecification masquerades as plurality.
Not all is lost for pluralists in unified memory regimes, however. Pluralists are best understood as structural-discursive agents, at home in pillarized memory regimes because of their structural commitment to plurality and their signature discursive practices of deliberation. Given modern tendencies to venerate consensus (as per Mouffe’s [Reference Mouffe2005] critique), it can be difficult for pluralists to recognize the consensus imperative embedded in unified official memory regimes as detrimental to political representation, agonistic memory spaces, and emancipation of certain groups and their neglected memory grievances. But with greater awareness of the fundamental nature of unified official memory regimes, pluralists may better recognize that intense moments of societal contestation and attempted fracture indicate that “the universal” narrative is not working any longer, or for everyone, encouraging them to avoid the potential traps in their own preferred discursive practices and to instead legitimize and embrace meaningful societal attempts at mnemonic fracture as a means to ultimately move toward pillarization.
Acknowledgments
This article has benefited from the generous edits, critiques, comments, and suggestions from Professor Juliet Johnson, Professor Tania Islas Weinstein, and Professor Maria Popova. I also want to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their close reading of the manuscript and their valuable intellectual engagement with its content. Thanks to their constructive feedback, this article has improved considerably through the rounds of revisions. My panel “Monumentality and Practices of Commemoration in the Contemporary Art Institution” (at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present ASAP12 Convention, 2021) provided invaluable feedback and encouragement for the very first draft of this article. My fieldwork and overall research throughout my doctoral work would not have been possible without the financial support of the Graduate Mobility Award at McGill University and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Interviews
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Interview 1, film director. November 4, 2021. Tirana.
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Kristaq Mitro, film director. November 4, 2021. Tirana.
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Arben Theodhosi, painter. November 9, 2021. Tirana.
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Vasjan Lami, actor and director. November 17, 2021. Tirana.
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Mevlan Shanaj, actor and director. November 24, 2021. Tirana.
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Vladimir Kaçaku, sculptor. November 24, 2021. Tirana.
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Interview 7, painter. December 2, 2021. Tirana.
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Ema Andrea, actor. February 8, 2022. Tirana.
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Stefan Taçi, multivisual artist. February 17, 2022. Tirana.
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Mirush Kabashi, actor. February 14, 2022. Tirana.
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Margarita Kristidhi, pianist. February 24, 2022. Tirana.
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Alda Bardhyli, director of the National Centre for the Book and Reading. November 27, 2021. Tirana.
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Pjetër Marku, painter and regional cultural administrator during communism and transition. June 8, 2023. Tirana.
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Bardhok Sulejmani, regional cultural administrator during communism. June 12, 2023. Tirana.
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Flutura Açka, publicist and Democratic Party MP. June 9, 2023. Tirana.
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Enkelejd Alibeaj, Democratic Party MP. June 30, 2023. Tirana.
Open access
