Musine Kokalari and the power of images : law, aesthetics and memory regimes in the Albanian experience

Fijalkowski, Agata (2015) Musine Kokalari and the power of images : law, aesthetics and memory regimes in the Albanian experience. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 28 (3). pp. 577-602. ISSN 0952-8059

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Abstract

Tarot cards are one means to unlocking an image. In this article, the image is that of the Albanian writer and political dissident Musine Kokalari at her 1946 trial. Her photograph features in Albanian discourses about its communist past. I argue that the image provides clues as to the manner in which the country has faced up to its own history. For what is certain is that the Albanian account of the Enver Hoxha dictatorship (1944-1991) remains incomplete. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘here-and-now in a flash’, and Roland Barthes’ and Italo Calvino’s reflections on photography and the power of the visual, we can identify at least two distinct memory regimes in the relevant historical, legal and political narratives.