Abstract
In this chapter, four historians collaborate to consider Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory as a methodological tool for historical research into women’s experiences of displacement in socialist Albania. It overviews how the socialist regime displaced women through gendered political persecution (execution, prison and internment) and simultaneously reproduced the displacement of women as the fulfilment of the subject position ‘woman’ in modern society. The chapter traces how contemporary displacement of women’s narratives from historical research, state recognition and social memory in post-socialist Albania ensures that the normative subject of historical discourses of communist period persecution is made masculine. The primary methodological insight is how collaborative and participant-led historical work can facilitate the narrativisation of traumatic events and women’s postmemories.
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Notes
- 1.
Displacements in 1944 were not done with a legal basis, it started ‘legally’ in 1945.
- 2.
Until 1977, abortion was punishable with up to five years imprisonment, which changed to two years in 1977. Carrying out abortion as a profession or carrying out a prohibited abortion that caused death or severe health problems was punishable with three to ten years under the 1952 Criminal Code and up to eight years under the 1977 Criminal Code.
- 3.
There were 18 prisons in 1947, primarily ‘used for the physical elimination of political opponents of the regime’ (Sufaj 2000, p. 110). Of 4749 prisoners in 1947, 3659 were political prisoners, and another 1272 people were in internment camps as ‘enemies of the state’ (Sufaj 2000, p. 106). By 1950 the number of prisoners had increased to 7168, with 2000 interned (Sufaj 2000, p. 106). See also Gashi (2012).
- 4.
There is no film or photo footage of this camp, and, significantly and worryingly, recent journalistic attempts to produce short ‘historical’ films about this prison use footage from unknown prisons elsewhere in Europe without reference (ref to the film?).
- 5.
This number is from http://www.iskk.gov.al/. ‘Albania can do more to eliminate blood feuds and domestic violence, says UN expert on extrajudicial killings’, United Nations Human Rights website, 23 February 2010, <http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=9839&LangID=E>.
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Ndoja, D., Woodcock, S. (2018). Postmemory and Women’s Displacement in Socialist Albania: Historical Methodologies as Response. In: Mitroiu, S. (eds) Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96833-9_10
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