CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Kryezi, Fatlum |
|---|---|
| Title | Nostalgia and Privatization of Factories in Prizren, Kosovo |
| Summary | In my paper I want to understand and explain the predicament, the socio-economic situation of Roma in Kosovo. Often their plight is explained with reference to poverty. But as Susser Ida (1996) pertinently argues "Poor people appear poor rather than unemployed or underemployed"(Susser (1996) in Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008:6). The focus of the paper is on nostalgia for a past where there was work. This cannot be understood without a general reflection on the privatization process in Prizren - Kosovo and its effects on the life of people caught in cycles of unemployment with special emphasis on minority groups such as Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities. I look at how nostalgia of factory life helps people make sense of their present. As a theoretical framework I rely on the concepts of “dispossession”, “accumulation by dispossession” as presented by Kasmir & Carbonella (2008), Harvey (2003, 2005) to describe how loss (of jobs, land, means of livelihood) and destruction, which have left people poor, destitute and without hope, is part and parcel of capitalism, how growth, accumulation depends on destruction, that is “dispossession”. As Tanja Petrovic says nostalgia that characterizes these memories does not prevent, but rather, allows operators of socialist industrialization and modernization to re-experience themselves as social actors. Nostalgia has the capacity to intervene in the present by encouraging tensions and creating discomfort, preventing socialist industrial ruins, the ruins of a modernist utopia, to be pacified, affectively neutralized and be sent back to history, or simply be ignored and gradually forgotten as the remains of an inappropriate socialist past. |
| Supervisor | Judit Veres |
| Department | Romani Studies Ps |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/kryezi_fatlum.pdf |
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