Description
This paper explores how the Croatian confectionery company Kraš has affectively and sensorily shaped imaginaries of childhood and national identity through its products and collectible chocolate stickers. Treating these materials as nostalgic archives, it examines how sweetness, play, and repetition become vehicles for belonging; how consumer acts such as collecting, sticking, and saving transform into affective gestures of memory-making. Through the 1990s albums Cro-Army, Knights’ Tales, Maki, and still popular Animal Kingdom the paper investigates how nostalgia functions as a mode of worldmaking that curates both personal and collective pasts and futures. Drawing on affect theory and ethnographic attention to how these archives persist in memory, homes, and digital spaces, it argues that Kraš operates as a sensory and emotional archive of belonging where sugar, touch, and longing sustain the feeling of nationhood.
Keywords: affect, nostalgia, childhood, Croatia, archive, belonging
