Engraving Portraits in the Skin: Vernacular Commemorative Tattoos for Ceauşescu, Tito, and Stalin

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official portraits of three former socialist leaders as a tattoo: Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito, and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). The mnemonic actors who have indulged in this practice after the 1990s contribute to a culture informed by vernacular memorials that conform to neither the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor its content. Correspondingly, this article focuses on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. Unlike memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that has suffered the same trauma, the commemorative tattoos analyzed in this article reflect a centrifugal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing and identity affirmation. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the ontological security of the past and “great leadership.” Thus, the overarching question is not how and why people materialize memories through their bodies but rather to what ends the inked body accommodates commemorative representations of former political leaders who are usually depicted in public memory as “unworthy” of commemoration.