"Reading Postcards, Changing Viewpoints: Skopje 1900-2019" | Mary Choncoff Lecture on Southeastern Europe

"The identity of modern Macedonia has been shaped by many forces over the centuries, including over the dynamic past 125 years. The hundreds of postcards featuring Skopje, produced locally and abroad, provide a diachronic, image-to-image telling of the city’s history by insiders and outsiders. They tell the story of the development of contemporary Macedonia’s identity by displaying the many aspects of Macedonian identity: language, geography, religion, history and the complexity of Macedonia’s multi-ethnic population.

In this talk, I discuss the genesis of my project on Skopje postcards, demonstrating through examples of Skopje postcards across the 20th and into the 21st century, how Skopje’s story has been framed and labeled within the mass-market postcard market as competing interests circulate different narratives of Skopje’s history.  War, occupation, shifting borders, and changing policies on national identity and language are reflected in the postcards and the images, captions, stamps, and languages of the written texts provide a unique vantage point from which to read Skopje’s changing viewpoints." Christina Kramer 

Christina Kramer, Professor Emerita at the University of Toronto, has conducted research on Balkan linguistics, languages, and language politics. She is the author of Macedonian: A Course for Beginning and Intermediate Students (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2011), as well as a literary translator. She has translated eight novels from Macedonian, including The Time of the Goats by Luan Starova, and is a co-translator of the Bulgarian novel Bai Ganyo and, with Rawley Grau, a collection of poetry by Macedonian modernist poet, Aco Šopov.

Event sponsored by the ASU Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.