Paper short abstract:

This paper examines multiple temporal trajectories of the performance of multiculturalism in the city of Pula, a regional urban centre in Croatia, through the evolution of historical discourses and ideologies underlying observed both cosmopolitan and parochial practices and identities.

Paper long abstract:

This article examines spatial and multiple temporal trajectories of the performance of multiculturalism in the city of Pula, a major tourist resort and regional urban centre in Croatia. The city's discursive location, as part of the border region of Istria, with a significant population of Italian nationality and other ethnic groups from the Balkan area, and a social memory that is linked to the socialist Yugoslavia, Italian and Austro-Hungarian past, creates a complex social context of contested and changing cultural imaginaries embedded in relations of power. The paper studies the evolution of the historical discourses and ideologies underlying cultural and linguistic practices through reconfigurations of space and time at both 'popular' and 'official' levels. It explores to what extent the image of the city, with its spatial and social structure, as well as socio-economic and historic contexts determines present discourses on multiculturalism and the peaceful coexistence of various ethnic groups as well as the ways those images shape a sense of hybrid identity, and how these identities are affected by interpersonal and inter-group communication in everyday life. In the discussion historical versions of the urban imagery of cosmopolitanism are contrasted with observed contemporary forms of multicultural coexistence and the present-day construction and use of ethnic/cultural categories, emphasizing the paradoxical outcome that, while subverting the official nationalist ideologies through vernacular understandings and multilingual practices, hybrid urban identities, personalized and conceived in terms of the emotional appeal of autochthony, simultaneously create new borders shaped by exclusionary discourses.