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In the decade after World War II, up to 350,000 ethnic Italians were displaced from the border zone between Italy and Yugoslavia known as the Julian March. History in Exile reveals the subtle yet fascinating contemporary repercussions of this often overlooked yet contentious episode of European history. Pamela Ballinger asks: What happens to historical memory and cultural identity when state borders undergo radical transformation? She explores displacement from both the viewpoints of the exiles and those who stayed behind. Yugoslavia's breakup and Italy's political transformation in the early 1990s, she writes, allowed these people to bring their histories to the public eye after nearly half a century.
Examining the political and cultural contexts in which this understanding of historical consciousness has been formed, Ballinger undertakes the most extensive fieldwork ever done on this subject--not only around Trieste, where most of the exiles settled, but on the Istrian Peninsula (Croatia and Slovenia), where those who stayed behind still live. Complementing this with meticulous archival research, she examines two sharply contrasting models of historical identity yielded by the "Istrian exodus": those who left typically envision Istria as a "pure" Italian land stolen by the Slavs, whereas those who remained view it as ethnically and linguistically "hybrid." We learn, for example, how members of the same family, living a short distance apart and speaking the same language, came to develop a radically different understanding of their group identities. Setting her analysis in engaging, jargon-free prose, Ballinger concludes that these ostensibly very different identities in fact share a startling degree of conceptual logic.
List of contents
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv INTRODUCTION In the Shadow of the Balkans,On the Shores of the Mediterranean 1 CHAPTER ONE Mapping the Terrain of Memory 15 PART I.MAKING AND BREAKING STATES CHAPTER TWO Geographies of Violence:Remembering War 49 CHAPTER THREE Constructing the "Trieste Question," Silencing the Exodus 76 CHAPTER FOUR Revisiting the History of World War II 97 PART II.MAKING MEMORY CHAPTER FIVE The Politics of Submersion:The Foibe 129 CHAPTER SIX Narrating Exodus:The Shapes of Memory 168 CHAPTER SEVEN Remaking Memory:The View from Istria 207 CHAPTER EIGHT Balkan Shadows,Balkan Mirrors:Paradoxes of "Authentic Hybridity "245 EPILOGUE "Good-bye,Homeland "266 Notes 275 Glossary 287 Bibliography 288 Index 317
About the author
Pamela Ballinger
Summary
In the decade after World War II, up to 350,000 ethnic Italians were displaced from the border zone between Italy and Yugoslavia known as the Julian March. This book reveals the repercussions of this episode of European history. It explores displacement from both the viewpoints of the exiles and those who stayed behind.
Additional text
"Pamela Ballinger has earned her status as an analyst of the Istrian Peninsula by the breadth and detail of her fieldwork and by her ability to excavate the historical complexity of the region and then situate it outside the parochial framework that has in general hindered local and international commentary on that area. . . . [S]he has been able to open up this part of the so-called Balkans to Europe (and vice versa) empirically and theoretically."---Glenda Sluga, Journal of Modern History
