Other(ing), self(portraying), negotiating: the spatial codification of values in Zagreb’s city-text

Abstract

One of the essential characteristics of the post-socialist transition is rethinking history and negotiating its meanings. As the capital of the newly independent state of Croatia, Zagreb communicated and mediated a dynamic process of national identity building, closely linked to the politics of heritage. The article explores the role of statuary and street toponymy in post-socialist identity building in the Croatian capital. The removal/installation of public plaques and statuary as well as the renaming of streets and squares in postsocialist Zagreb was a revealing indicator and an instrument in the post-socialist (re)writing/(re)signifying of space. These political acts have disclosed the ‘Other’, in relation to whom the construction of post-socialist Croatian identity was developed. The article argues that symbolic rewriting of Zagreb’s city-text was organized and shaped primarily by discursive practices of Othering and Selfreferencing, as systematic acts of articulation in the frame of the politics of landscape. The transition process was accompanied by semantic displacements in the landscape which occured in three ways: by a) relocation of certain streets and monuments from central to more peripheral zones, or vice versa, b) resemiotization of memorials, and c) ‘secondary sacralization’, or resemiotization of places.