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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 805

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Discourse, War and Tourism: mapping aggression against Dubrovnik

Authors: Bertoša, Mislava; Skelin Horvat, Anita
Submitted by: Bertoša, Mislava (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia)

The emplacement of a certain discourse in public urban space with the aim to provide tourist information can include its “darker” side as well: to mark and to map places linked to violence, war and loss of life. Discourses emplaced in the material world are often used as a means to announce political meanings and ideologies, as a means to preserve memory or to take a position in the hierarchy of power. In this proposal we aim to analyse narratives and visual representations evoking aggression against Dubrovnik during the Croatian War for Independence. Some of these discourses are placed in the very promoted and well-known historical part of the town, by the Dubrovnik Tourist Board, in the form of tourist information exposed to the reception of tourists. The others are also situated in the historical part of the town, but without sociocultural authorization. Their sender is anonymous, but their intention is the same: to inform tourists about violence and suffering that have happened there. In this sense the question of authority is also important here: who is authorized to place a discourse in the material world and how different social actors articulate and contextually produce narratives on the same topic – aggression on Dubrovnik in 1991 – differently, producing thus two versions of the same story, the official and the unofficial one. While the Dubrovnik Tourist Board takes the position of the mediator and only indirectly evokes war events, the anonymous author(s) explicitly mark(s) city houses and walls with narratives on war sufferings. Taking over the ‘never forget’ rhetoric, the anonymous author(s) produce(s) unofficial narratives in different languages, and propose(s) them to potential tourists. Drawing on Scollon and Wong Scollon’s (2003) notions of geosemiotics and transgressive semiotics, our proposal aims to analyse similarities and differences between these narratives and visual representations. We focus on the analysis of the discursive constructions of war, aggression and politics of memory in the context of tourist promotion. We are also concerned with the status of exposed unauthorized narratives: they are examined as transgressive discourses (Scollon and Wong Scollon 2003) with a specific purpose and tacit approval (by official city authorities). We also sketch discursive strategies used in the construction of these narratives and examine their means and purposes including the question of reproducing or challenging the taken-for-granted political and war ideology. The analysis of the narrative production (structural and temporal organization, particularity of the contexts, evaluation of the events and its consequences for the narrators) follows some of the main concepts used in Labov (1997).