Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Greece and the South: Grammars of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity, edited by Maria Boletsi and Dimitris Papanikolaou, Oct 2022

This article analyses Greek orientalism towards the Arabs from the end of the eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It examines an extensive body of texts, beginning with Adamantios Korais’ rallying call for Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt and ending with the post-Suez attacks on Nasser’s anti-colonial policies by leading post-war Greek writers. The analysis approaches the representations of the Arabs as a branch of a wider Greek orientalist discourse that, for the most part, has focused historically on the Turks. In so doing, it conceptualizes Greek orientalism as partly a ‘borrowed construction’, internalized in Greek discourse from European colonial ideology, and partly as an articulation of what Edward Said has called an imperial ‘structure of feeling’, which in the case of Greece emanates from the irredentist/neo-Byzantine expansionist vision of Megali Idea. The analysis deploys the concepts of ‘internalized’ and ‘transposed orientalism’ to denote a process whereby a particular culture, like that of modern Greece, which is itself the object of western orientalist depiction, first embraces this demeaning image of itself and then, in an attempt to mitigate it, projects it in upon other neighbouring cultures that are perceived to be inferior to or less ‘westernized’ than its own. Finally, the article examines the role of Egyptian-Greek writers in the construction of this discourse as cultural mediators who, in contrast to other Greek thinkers and artists, had a direct experience of interacting with modern Arab culture.

Can we imagine Greece and the South beyond the enduring binaries that have long defined them? In 2014, the art institution documenta publicly announced that its fourteenth edition (d14) would take place in both Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. d14’s stated goal, from the onset, was to balance ‘the need to embody the palpable tension between the North and the South’ while avoiding ‘the traps of binary logic’. Yet d14’s critics focused on how the exhibition was conceived and structured by a series of binaries, failing to overcome the intense sociopolitical antagonism between Germany and Greece, North and South. This article argues that while these critiques were necessary, they overlooked examples of connective thinking that delicately threaded together the split event. The article revisits works by four artists that exemplify this non-binary approach: Jani Christou, Vlassis Caniaris, Andreas Lolis and Alexandra Bachzetsis. Using Christou’s idea of the ‘continuum’ as a paradigm, these artworks are offered as much-needed complements to the impasse of opposition, (a)symmetries and doubles left behind by d14. Ultimately, though, the article looks beyond the exhibition of d14 to consider how the continuum’s fragile capacity for softening hardened positions might be extended to opening potential forms of relation within and between Greece and the South.

The fourteenth edition of documenta, the international exhibition of contemporary art, introduced in the cultural field of Greece a strong statement about the country being part of the Global South. Traditionally, documenta takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel. Yet the fourteenth iteration in 2017, titled ‘Learning from Athens’, was equally split between Kassel and Athens. As documenta is considered the world’s most important manifestation of contemporary art, already for more than two decades its artistic directors try to make the exhibition project globally relevant. As every edition, so also the fourteenth, was accompanied by several publications that constructed a rich theoretical framework. Four years after the exhibition project’s finissage, this article revisits the magazine of documenta 14, titled South as a State of Mind, in order to reflect on the conception of the terms ‘South’ and ‘Global South’ proposed there in relation to the situated Athens-based perspective. As the documenta 14 motto reassured, this was an exercise in ‘learning from Athens’ between 2013 and 2017: how productive did this perspective render conceptualizations of the South for the past, present or future? And what role did the intense context of the 2010s in Greece play in such conceptualizations, in the midst of the country’s sovereign debt crisis, waves of refugees and social and political turmoil?

A series of entangled crisis-scapes have been unfolding in the past decade in Chile, Argentina and Brazil – geographies that have been central to discourses of and about the Global South. Ranging from presidential impeachment and military control to inflation and austerity, Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian crisis-scapes have given rise to filmic expressions of queer feminist critique that challenge neo-liberal governmentality. This article focuses on indicative cinematic tendencies in these three countries, while taking into account the author’s positionality as a (Greek) researcher engaged in the anthropology of cinema and neo-liberalism. Swinging back and forth from Greece to the Southern Cone, the aim of the article is to extract what is affectively shared between seemingly disparate subjectivities and experiences of coping with the present of crises. One of the things shared is queer survivalism, as manifested in the short fiction films Apodrasi apo ton Efthrafsto Planiti (Escaping the Fragile Planet, 2020) by Thanasis Tsimpinis and Os últimos românticos do mundo (The Last Romantics of the World, 2020) by Henrique Arruda – both featuring a gay couple getting through their last day on Earth while a toxic pink cloud destroys the planet.

This manifesto takes the coincidence of Peru’s and Greece’s bicentennials of independence, and their overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic, as a departure point, in order to propose a different understanding of mourning from the Global South. The article is an open invitation to reinforce mourning’s capacity to be a reproductive life force, responding to contemporary experiences of loss in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated processes of extinction, especially in resource extraction zones, like the Amazon. Taking inspiration from ancient Indigenous techniques for soil regeneration, fertilizing mourning is a call to merge traditional knowledge, collective practices and non-anthropocentric world-views that resist individualism and capitalism both in the Global South and in places that defend communal life in the north of the planet. This manifesto proposes that to transform prevalent colonial, modern structures, it is necessary to develop a different relationship with nature, by reconsidering the entanglements between life, death and regeneration.

Review of: Greek Cinema and Migration, 1991–2016, Philip E. Phillis (2020)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 272 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47443-704-2, p/bk, £19.99

ISBN 978-1-47443-703-5, h/bk, £80.00

Review of: Contested Antiquity: Archaeological Heritage and Social Conflict in Modern Greece and Cyprus, Esther Solomon (ed.) (2021)

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 330pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25305-597-2, p/bk, $48.00