SERBIAN-CROATIAN CULTURAL COOPERATION IN MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The subject of the paper is the discourse representation of cultural cooperation between Croatia and Serbia in media texts. The aim was to examine the dominant strategies used by the mainstream media in Croatia and Serbia in the representation of appearances, events and activities of artists from two countries six years after the first research (2012) by using the method of critical discourse analysis. Starting from the main research question – are the discourses on Serbian-Croatian cultural cooperation still marked by the structure of public speech and the previously noted symbolic evaluations of the Other – sample for analysis consisted texts published in online editions of the daily newspapers Jutarnji list and Blic collected during March, April and May of 2018 . The results of the research show that representation of cultural cooperation in both the Serbian and Croatian media is almost the same like six years ago. The dominant strategy is spectacular representation, primarily on an individual level. The activities of individuals are reported on, while institutional cultural cooperation, independent cultural scene, and topics from the domain of cultural policy are neglected or completely invisible. Unlike in previous research, when nationalistic discourse was influenced by already existing socio-cognitive basis originated on the ideological division 'We' and 'They' and it was 'more clandestine and 'hidden' than the one from the nineties, it has now become articulated. It is shaped by almost all manipulative strategies – differentiation, confrontation, silence and forgetting, which expresses the polarized relationship between the opposing groups, Serbian and Croatian. Through the patriotic discourse of well-known stereotypes that support the uncoordinated social and political narratives of Serbia and Croatia, first and foremost those of the past, journalists are pointing out explicit negative valuation towards the actors, uniting themselves with members of their own group, defending and clearly distancing themselves from members of the other group, which is attacked. On the other hand, the detected antinationalist discourse in the form of critical counter-narratives of the representation of certain subjects and artists follows the tradition of “culture of disagreement and resistance” to the current circumstances. Detected dualism of nationalist and anti-nationalist discourse in our research points out to the existence of, in a manner of speaking, two parallel forms of cultural space in the context of cultural cooperation between Croatia and Serbia