Specters of Communism : Albanian Post-Socialist Studies and the Return of the Communist Repressed

The paper aims to analyze a new academic wave in Albanian Studies focused on the Albanian communist past through the lens of the “spectral turn”, which sees specters and haunting as compelling analytical and methodological tools for the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences. Central to the idiom of the “spectral turn” are a series of concepts that have become increasingly important in contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, such as trauma, the uncanny, mourning, and memory. Specters, in this case, are part of a symptomatology of repression and remembrance, and the figure of the ghost stands for the specters of the repressed or forgotten cultural legacies of communism in Albanian academy and society. Analyzed through this “spectral turn”, Albanian post-socialist and cultural studies provide a compelling argument for a continued interest in the noisy ghosts of Albanian culture, and invite national and international scholarship to a séance with Albania’s unfinished communist past.