Re-incarnations of the Nation
Croatian Narrations about Identity in the Last Decade of the 20th Century

The profound cultural changes that took place in Croatia in the 1990s intensified identity discourse on an individual and collective level. The attempt to construct a new identity in a crisis situation following the fall of previous system was significantly affected by war shock and a general state of cultural trauma typical for cross-border spaces where diverse cultures clash.

The problem of narrative is strictly connected with that of identity. ‘Narrative’ is understood as an epistemological structure – a process which is the subject of changes in time. No society can be described without knowledge of the narrations it creates. There are various inspirations for such stories including history, national myths and politics. The present study is an attempt to analyze characteristic narrations produced by Croatian society in the 1990s and to establish their connection with the reconstruction of a Croatian sense of identity.