Following the Dead Body of Enver Hoxha
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FOLLOWING THE BODIES OF ENVER HOXHA: AN ILLUMINATION OF ALBANIAN POST-SOCIALIST MEMORY POLITICS Kailey Alana Rocker A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Anthropology. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Michele Rivkin-Fish Margaret Wiener Jocelyn Chua © 2017 Kailey Alana Rocker ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Kailey Alana Rocker: Following the Bodies of Enver Hoxha: An Illumination of Albanian Post- Socialist Memory Politics (Under the direction of Michele Rivkin-Fish) This research traces Albania’s post-socialist transition through the lens of Katherine Verdery’s dead-body politics and Anne Stoler’s imperial ruin(ation). I follow the dead body of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s former communist dictator, from its animations during Albania’s late socialist period – his grand burial ceremony in April 1985 and the construction of the Enver Hoxha Pyramid Museum in 1988 – to those in the following post-socialist period – his exhumation from the prestigious Martyr’s Cemetery in 1992 and the later attempts of Parliament to completely remove his memorial museum. I demonstrate two points: that Verdery’s framework of dead-body politics remains a useful analytic alongside that of imperial ruination to examine contemporary politics in post-socialist Eastern Europe and that “dead bodies” can take other ruined forms, such as monumental buildings like the Pyramid museum. The ruin expands our notion of what constitutes the dead body and its different forms in post-socialist Eastern Europe. iii FOR JAMES WARFEL iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The UNC Chapel Hill Anthropology department, the UNC Center for European Studies, and the UNC Center for Global Initiatives funded this research conducted over the course of two three-month periods in the summers of 2015 and 2016. This thesis could not have been accomplished without the help of many individuals. I would like to thank the following people and institutions for graciously supporting me and this project. First, to my Master’s Thesis committee – Michele Rivkin-Fish, Margaret Wiener, and Jocelyn Chua – thank you for your guidance throughout this process and comments on the Fourth Semester Paper, which served as the foundation for this thesis. I am especially grateful to the staff of Cultural Heritage without Borders – Albania for their support during the course of this research, the use of their offices in Tirana, Albania, and their invitation to participate in the 29th Regional Restoration Camp in Shkodra, Albania. I would particularly like to thank Lejla Hadžić, Mirian Bllaci, Arianna Briganti, Anisa Lloja, Nedi Petri, Anisa Mano, and Stavri Burda. I would also like to thank Francesco Iacono, a visiting postdoctoral researcher from the University of Cambridge, for his editorial comments on my letters of introduction. I would like to thank the staff of The Site of Witness and Memory, the State Archives, the Institute for Cultural Monuments, and the National History Museum in Albania for providing archival resources for this project, commenting on my project and its design, and allowing me to v interview them. In particular, I would like to thank Suela Ҫuçi for helping me navigate the state archives and secure the photographs in Appendix A. I would especially like to thank Erilda Selaj and Blerta Meta, not only for their friendship and support, but also for their help with this research project. Erilda kindly read and commented on drafts of my research questionnaires and helped arrange interviews with members of the National History Museum. Blerta provided emotional support during this process and helped connect me with the Albanian art world. Earlier drafts of this thesis were presented at the Duke Futures and Ruins Workshop in March 2016 and the American Anthropological Association annual conference in Minneapolis, MN, in November 2016. I would like to thank members of the materialities group at the Duke writing workshop who thoughtfully commented on my paper and pushed me to incorporate the Pyramid as a key figure in my work – Paolo Bocci, Andrew Littlejohn, Anne Allison, Diana Bocarejo, and Jennifer Shaw. I would also like to thank my family who supported me throughout this process. This includes my blood relatives – Karen Rocker, Chip Rocker, and Maggie Rocker – as well as my UNC anthropology cohort-mates. Thank you for encouraging me to continue writing and editing even when writer’s block seemed to have the upper-hand. And last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my partner, Jonathan Eaton, who actively helped, encouraged, and supported this work. Jonathan was present throughout the entire process – serving as a soundboard during its earliest stages and as an editor, proofer, and layout editor in its later ones. I am grateful for his patience and careful commentary on not only drafts of my thesis but also drafts of my Albanian letters of introduction and interview questionnaires. I vi would also like to thank him for accompanying me on my trips to Martyrs’ Cemetery and Sharrë Cemetery as well as the sculpture studios in Tirana, Albania. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Tale of Two Exhumations ..................................................................................... 1 Post-Socialist Dead-Body Politics and Ruin in Eastern Europe ..................................................... 6 Writing Geanologies: Albania’s Timeline Visited ....................................................................... 11 The Ceremony ........................................................................................................................... 14 The Enver Hoxha Pyramid Museum ......................................................................................... 17 Re-Writing Geanologies: Albania’s Timeline Visited Again ....................................................... 20 “We Cannot Preserve the Place Where the Ghost of the Dictator Sleeps…” ............................... 24 Conclusion: Imagjino .................................................................................................................... 29 Appendix A: Hoxha’s Funeral Procession in Pictures .................................................................. 31 Appendix B: The Ruination of the Pyramid in Pictures ............................................................... 34 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 37 viii INTRODUCTION: A TALE OF TWO EXHUMATIONS In 1992, Albania’s first post-socialist, multi-party Parliament1 elected to carryout, as one of its first acts, the exhumation and reburial of one of the country’s most infamous figures: Enver Hoxha, the former dictator who had controlled both the Communist Party and country “with an iron fist”2 for forty-one years. In May that year his corpse and those of ten other senior communist officials were unceremoniously and quietly disinterred from the Cemetery of the Martyrs of the Nation (Martyrs Cemetery) – a cemetery reserved for the heroes, or special dead, of World War II. With little media coverage or input from the public,3 immediate families of the deceased silently reburied their relatives’ corpses in the public cemetery of Sharrë. Hoxha’s corpse, which had rested since 1985 at the very crest of Martyrs Cemetery and to the left of the impressive socialist realist statue titled “Mother Albania,” now lay wedged among those who had died in 1992 – one amongst thousands. In the immediate wake of state socialism, Enver Hoxha’s dead body, symbolic of the former regime, was spatially and temporally displaced – a potent political statement that would set the tone for Albania’s early (and ongoing) post-socialist period. 1 In this paper, the “post-socialist, multi-party” Parliament refers to those members elected during Albania’s second multi-party election when the first opposition majority held sway over the Socialist Party (the former Communist Party). During the first multi-party election in March 1991, the Socialist Party had majority seats. 2 “With an iron fist” references a comment made by Hoxha’s successor – Ramiz Alia – when asked by Abrahams (2015: 28), a consultant for Human’s Rights Watch and the author of Modern Albania, about Hoxha’s grip on the Party and the country. 3 These exhumations have been confined to only a few sources such as the recently digitized Albanian Parliament proceedings, a few news articles from 1992, and the memoires of Hoxha’s son, Ilir, titled Babai Im, Enver Hoxha (My Father, Enver Hoxha). 1 This body was one of many in a “parade of corpses” across Eastern Europe in the early 1990s which included not only the corpses of the famous dead but also their statue counterparts (Verdery 1999: 12, 39-40) – the excessively proportioned and mass-produced statuary that reflected the shared political vision of the “official [socialist] public landscape” (Light and Young 2011: 493). An important task of post-socialist regimes became the movement, replacement, and/or destruction of these bodies – a politically charged process used to rewrite the historical, ideological, and social landscape. Statues fell, bodies were exhumed, and monuments were repurposed or destroyed – signifying change on multiple scales from the nation-state to the everyday (Verdery 1999:25). Within this framework known as post-socialist necropolitics (Bernstein 2011: 246), or dead-body politics (Verdery 1999), the