and Yugoslav conflicts and that contrasted with the secular, physically compromised theater.
Osijek’s theater was only restored to performance condition in 1994, and several alternative spaces, often literally underground, harbored Osijek’s musical activity even before the bombing’s cessation. Recording and airing new pop songs symbolically resisted the bombing, and particular “importance was placed at that time on the creative act of composing” (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 169). A “rich palette of musical events […] took place at that time,” developing further in the months after the bombardment with events such as the festival’s culminating “Cathedral” concert (176).
The symbolic reclamation by STD “Pajo Kolarić” of Croatian territory continued in May 1993, when the event (now larger and renamed the Festival of Croatian Tambura Music in Osijek) returned home. It has continued to meet there annually ever since (twice as often as before the war). Affirming the connection between musical activity and the war effort, Frano Dragun wrote of the “massive” 1993 festival that “in spite of the proximity of the [war’s] front line, economic hardships, and internal and international tensions, WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy, so on the front line, thus also in culture” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1993, 6; my translation). The 1993 festival also featured a Mass with tambura music in the “Cathedral.” Duško Topić, who prepared a special tambura accompaniment (Hadžihusejnović-Valašek 1998, 180), directed the performance by the Folklore Choir and Orchestra of his recently renamed Croatian Cultural-Artistic Society “Osijek 1862” (hereafter HKUD “Osijek 1862”).11 The festival’s many orchestras from all over Croatia, even Dalmatia (where tambura music historically was not prominent), evinced widening interest in the tambura as a Croatian instrument within “national integration ideology” and in reviving Croatian patriotic and religious songs banned in Yugoslavia (Bogojeva-Magzan 2005, 108–109). As Ruža Bonifačić argues, this growing interest was due in part to the military and political involvement of professional bands such as Zlatni Dukati, whose service helped establish them as Croatia’s most popular musicians (1998, 138).
AGENTS OF MUSICAL NARRATIVES
Such ideology and support for military and political resistance to Yugoslavia are also evident in Dragun’s selection and capitalization of the pronoun “WE.” This term held a particularly territorializing capacity in 1990s Croatia, since “boundaries and territory, the key issues at stake in Eastern Slavonia, were fundamental to establishing or reinforcing a distinctive Croatian national identity—a means of defining the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Klemenčić and Schofield 2001, 48). The pronoun “I” largely disappeared from Croatian popular music, becoming associated with Serbian romantic songwriter subjectivities (Crnković 2001, 38), while “us,” “we,” and especially “our” strongly encapsulated “the abstract nation” during the 1990s (45). Citizens’ common term of endearment for Croatia became lijepa naša (our beautiful), an abbreviation of the Croatian national anthem “Our Beautiful Homeland.”
In this way citizens constituted discursively and through physical acts of proximity and intimacy what Alexei Yurchak has termed a “public of svoi [ours]” (2005, 116).12 In postsecession Croatia, however, the result was not the deterritorialized milieu of Yurchak’s Soviet public but a territorialization of public sociality through the state, its lands, and its borders. Discursive formulations of “us” and “them” in the former Yugoslavia most typically connote racial or ethnic (as opposed to gender or age) distinction. Interlocutors frequently asked me Jesi li naš? (“Are you ours?”). This question can pertain to shared ethnicity or shared citizenship, but the latter is folded into the former, since Croats abroad acquire citizenship by virtue of ethnicity. Croats who learned that I was not from the Croatian diaspora often expressed surprise that a non-Croat would research “their” music. As I argued previously, this territorialization itself was a means of becoming by virtue of setting the minoritarian “WE” onto new lines of flight from the majoritarian Yugoslav collective. This went hand in hand with racializations of Serbian Others, surfacing both in explicit discourse on biological difference and in more broadly interpretable commentaries on belonging based on ethnicity and citizenship (“WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy”).
This division into a culturally supreme “us” and a musically, militarily, and at times racially inferior “them” paralleled popular songs’ emphasis on religious and ethnic differences (Baker 2010, 25). Following Ceribašić (2000), Baker notes that gender, too, framed important distinctions, though implicitly (within narrative roles rather than within “us” and “them” narratives); women mostly sang emotional and prayerful rather than expository songs, though they “were more likely to be ‘expository’ than men purely ‘emotional’” (2010, 28). Of Meri Cetinić’s famous “Zemlja dide mog” (My granddad’s country), Baker comments: “Cetinić’s narrator remembered her grandfather telling her about ‘people not like us’ and looked to a day when a well-known person (presumably a euphemism for an enemy who did not need naming) would want to take the land. ‘We’ would not let go of it” (28). The juxtaposition of an unnamed, hostile Other with a specified “us” parallels the contrast in detail between an unspecified zlotvor (evildoer) and the concrete agents “we,” “Šokci,” and “peaceful people” in male artists’ recordings such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (whose call for the Drava and Danube Rivers to address the world draws closely on “Our Beautiful Homeland’s” plea for the Drava, Sava, Danube, and sea to tell the world of the Croat’s love for his people).
For Arendt, as Kristeva writes, the “essence of narration” is not “coherence intrinsic to the narrative, that is, as the art of storytelling”; what matters instead “is to recognize the moment of the achievement and to identify the agent of the history/story” (Kristeva 2000, 55). The emphasis on “us/we/ours” in narrative songs, festival publications, and government proclamations and agendas recognized and proclaimed the agents of Croatian wartime resilience. History is necessarily idealized as the narrator constructs a narrative out of “true history”; as Kristeva herself argues, the “art of narrative lies in its ability to condense the action down to an exemplary period of time, to take it out of the continuous flux, and to reveal a who” (55). Thus the “who/we,” through this revelation, becomes separated from “them.” Idealized histories of past distinction interject to confirm the truth of racial and religious difference, despite or perhaps in response to the decades-long propagation of alternative truths in Yugoslavia. The created agent’s remainder—the Other—becomes an all-too-familiar, perhaps intimately known, yet ultimately unnamable enemy or barbarian, for to name it would be to create another “who.” At most, such media reduce enemies to the pronoun “they” (oni), which in Croatian and Serbian is also the deictic “those” and thus “function[s] in a heightened indicative way” (Tomlinson 2015, 311n1). Only intimate, wartime knowledge of the Other makes the term sensible. Unlike “we” (mi), oni implies distance, either physical or personal, for to apply this pronoun rather than proper names to those present is considered rude (Đurašković 2007). “We” is the agent of an ever-new narrative and the subject of an intimate becoming that generates closeness with others who are “ours” and distances those who are not, while “they/those” is the term of an intimately distant minor presence.13
Yet an agent—a “who”—does not suffice to generate narrative. As Kristeva writes: “The actor alone, no matter how heroic his exploit, does not constitute the marvelous action. Action is marvelous only if it becomes memorable. […] It is the spectators who bring the story/history to completion, and they do so by virtue of the thought that comes after the act, and this is accomplished via recollection” (2000, 54). The constant acts of spectation, audition, and recollection that contributed to the narratives of independent Croatia involved, first, the narrators themselves: pedagogues and tambura promoters such as the festival’s president, Frano Dragun, and songwriters such as Antun Nikolić “Tuca.” Yet they soon sought ever broader publics: festival participants, local audiences (the public of
