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.
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