The Past in Question: Modern Macedoni...
23.08.09
Keith Brown
This ticket examines the relationship between nationwide history, identity, and government in twentieth-century Macedonia. It focuses on the reverberating power of events bordering an armed uprising in August 1903, when a anarchist organization challenged the forces of the Ottoman Empire by seizing check of the mountain town of Krusevo. A century later, Krusevo is part of the Republic of Macedonia and a situate for yearly commemorations of 1903. In the advance of the intervening hundred years, a variety of communities have vied to validate an authoritative account of what happened in 1903--and to shake a leg those events into a longer and wider portrayal of social, cultural, and chauvinistic evolution.
Keith Brown examines how Krusevo's residents, refugees, and exiles have participated--along with scholars, journalists, artists, bureaucrats, and politicians--in a discourse about their vexed past. By tracing varied approaches to understanding, commemorating, and narrating the events of 1903, he shows how in this unsatisfactory mountain town the "deviltry of nationalism" by which fate is written into particular documented events has neither failed nor unambiguously succeeded. Stories of heroism, self-sacrifice, and congruity still rub against tales of treachery, flocks settling, and disaster as people move along disintegrate to terms with the legacies of imperialism, socialism, and nationalism. The efforts of Krusevo's continual generations to transcend a history of intercommunal violence romp how rival claims to schooling and truth acquire reviving significance during rapid collective, economic, and political switch.
Source: Examiner.com
