To promote their desired national identity, the North Macedonian government funded the Skopje 2014 Project––an initiative including abundant statues, architectural façades, and other structures that depict Ancient Macedon as North Macedonia’s heritage. This project received copious amounts of criticism on two central fronts: first, that its allusions to Ancient Macedon are a false depiction of history; second, that its aesthetic is tacky. While valid arguments are made on each of these fronts, I argue that the latter complicates the former when analyzed in the context of North Macedonia’s precarity. In this analysis, I employ the work of Judith Butler and Liron Lavi as a theoretical backdrop to interrogate the nature of North Macedonia’s precarity. Analyzing political negotiations between North Macedonia and Greece surrounding Skopje 2014, I introduce the term persistent infelicity––a type of precarity in which the validity of an identity performance is made inaccessible for a given entity. Further, the commodification of the Ancient Macedon narrative has transformed North Macedonia’s identity performance from an iterative production to an instantaneous transaction, limiting North Macedonia’s opportunity to challenge its infelicitous state. However, I assert that the aesthetic of Skopje 2014 creates space for subversion even considering these limitations. Expanding upon the work of Susan Sontag, I identify Skopje 2014’s aesthetic as camp and delineate its function in the project as one of subversive compliance. Camp as a rhetorical tool allows North Macedonia to perform a bifurcated identity—one identity that is insincere yet appeases its international audience and another that is more authentic yet controversial directed toward an intra-national audience. While this has modestly empowering implications for Skopje 2014, this analysis concludes that the identity performance of North Macedonia has been propelled into the realm of simulacra—a realm ultimately and perilously untethered to the “real”––and prompts further consideration for other precarious nations whose identities may be fated to persistent infelicity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-11387 |
| Date | 23 April 2024 |
| Creators | Rice, Lila |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
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