Borders of memory. Competing heritages and fractured memoryscapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This chapter explores the semantic transformation of ‘war heritage’ and the proliferation of divisive memory sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The point of departure will be the notion of the ‘border’, examined here not just in its spatial and geopolitical meaning, but rather as a ‘narrative function’ that produces (and is produced by) a fractured memoryscape, in which different narratives compete and conflict. A heterogeneous corpus of sites of memory – the memorial of Srebrenica; the region of Prijedor; the city of Mostar and the memorial sites of Jasenovac/ Donja Gradina – will be analyzed, in an attempt to draw a conceptual map of the discontinuous topographies of memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Adopting the theoretical framework of a cultural (Lotman) and spatial-narrative (Greimas) semiotics, these places of memory will be analyzed not as single and isolated sites, but in a systemic perspective, so as to illustrate their reciprocal narrative interactions. The aim is to verify how these conflicting heritages hold a semiotic dialogue which generates a peculiar structure of symbolic territoriality, where different forms of spatiality, temporality and subjectivity coexist and compete.