Albanian Personal Narratives of the Kosovo War and the Struggle for a National Narrative

Abstract

This paper looks at the “war of memories” taking place in postwar Kosovo through a close reading of diaries and memoirs written by the protagonists of the war - both fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army and civil-ians. It argues that the two narratives emerging from this literature correspond to gendered variants of the Albanian national self-identification fixated in the early nineteenth century

Keywords

• Kosovo, Albanian National Narratives, War Memories, Imagined Communities, War and Masculinity, National Narratives and Masculinity