Chandra Prakash Bhongir, Civil Engr, May04 - Repositories

It was their pressure in the Ottoman court that legalized the teaching of Albanian inside
Albania in 1908. In fact it was the input from the Diasporic intellectuals which created
the conditions for Albanian independence in 1912.
The roots of Albanian nationalism and the role of Diasporic intellectuals are better
understood by examining the importance which memory and politics of national identity
play in Albanian history. Sectoral memories on the myth of Scanderbeg in Albania
function much in the same way, that French memories on the myth of Joan of Arc are
constructed in France. According to Pierre Nora, these sectoral memories have
restructured the way the relationship between past, present and future is experienced and
they have reshaped the forms of collectivity that now cohabit the national space. For
Nora national memory is not a monolithic mental image of the past which is internalized
the same way by all members of a given society but as the diverse representational modes
by means of which communities imagine, represent and enact their specific relationship
to the past. In the modern world, it is the society rather than the nation state that has
become the linchpin of social organization. The idea of Nation and nationhood remains
the nostalgic and enduring figure of the larger social collectivity. It is the emotive force
of national memories argues Nora that has given them their magnetic, contagious and
volatile character in the life of modern nation-states. 9
Like Joan of Arc in France, for Albanians, Scanderbeg and his memory serve
primarily the nationalist cause and its proponents. Even though he lived in the fifteenth
century, it is not until the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century that images of
Scanderbeg become prolific.The idea of collective amnesia applies well to Scanderbeg’s
9 Nora, 11.
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