The lecture will focus on the strategies and techniques applied after 1944 and 1989 by political forces, scholars, and society at large for producing evidence about one the most debatable periods in modern Bulgarian history, the anti-fascist resistance before and during World War II. Taking methodological inspiration from Susan Sontag’s cultural criticism and Bruno Latour’s cognitive criticism, the talk will outline the ways in which evidence of the anti-fascist movement was looked for, collected, interpreted and constructed, as well as modified, manipulated, and destroyed depending on the immediate political and social contexts. By undertaking a closer examination of three major realms of evidence production – documentary materials, physical bodies, and witness testimonies – the lecture will highlight similarities and differences in the approaches followed during the communist and post-communist periods in the attempts for writing, rewriting, and revising of the past.
Image: Nikolai Vukov: Mosaics in memory of September 1923 uprising, city center of Montana, Northwest Bulgaria