Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine Kosovo Albanian diasporan summer holidays as spent in Albanian and Montenegrin coast. It will illustrate how recently these beaches are gaining multiple connotations and how they are used as places where their past and new identities are negotiated and performed.

Paper long abstract:

People tend to move from their homelands for various reasons, forcefully or willingly. However, keeping ties with homeland and people left behind remains an issue of big interest for them. One way to keep these ties is by practicing holidays back home. These holidays are filled with different activities, like meeting family members and friends, carrying on with family rites, building houses, going to the seaside with homeland family members, etc. that could be understood as a dialogue between them and homeland, concerned with who they were, are, and want to be, thus their identity.

Due to political situation in Kosovo at the end of 20th century regular practice of homeland holidays by Albanian Diaspora started only after 1999. Close observation of how they spend seaside holidays, what they do, and why they choose these particular places enabled their analyzing both in transnational and identity context, where different levels of local, regional and national cultural constructions and awareness are intertwined and in interplay.

Analytical tools in this paper will be the concept of transnational social field, as conceptualized by Glick Schiller/Levitt, and the frame of 'identity negotiation', as defined by Swan and Bosson.

James Clifford conceptualizes diasporan memories and practices of collective identity maintained over long stretches of time as a 'changing same', as something endlessly hybridized and in process but persistently there. Therefore, this way of holidaying being closely tied to diasporan inter-generational identification could be easily also considered or interpreted as a mnemonic practice of a 'changing same'.