Sweers & Ross/Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity, 4. Mapping 'Inconvenient' Music Heritage

The method of cultural mapping – more particularly the concept of counter mapping (Duxbury, Garrett-Petts, and MacLennan 2015: 6) – can also serve as a critical theoretical avenue of escaping the rigid discourses of post-socialist heritage management that operates within “socialist totalitarianism” vs. “post-socialist democracy” dichotomy. Drawing on authors that have examined heritage as a political and cultural process of remembering/ forgetting, this chapter offers critical reading of the politics of heritage by showing that anti-totalitarian paradigm in heritagization of socialist musical past is not ideologically neutral or unproblematic, but strongly related to both ideologies of nationalism (and revisionism) and neoliberal capitalism. Although scholars agree that every heritage is contested, the concept of the so-called “inconvenient heritage” (Dearborn, Lynne and Stallmeyer, John C, 2009: 34), contested or dissonant heritage (Tunbridge and Achworth 1996), incorporates greater degree of the problems of ownership, control and representations. The heritage management generally promotes the dominant or authorized interpretations of such contested heritage by obscuring or removing the politically inexpedient parts. This is exemplified in a case study addressing the contested discourses of heritage management related to the socialist musical past in the post-Yugoslav context. This chapter thus examines the political aspects of heritagization of contested genre of partisan songs (antifascist resistance songs during WWII) as the leading genre of socialist music legacy, which has been after the collapse of socialism and breakup of Yugoslavia proclaimed “inappropriate heritage of totalitarian past.”