Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Current Issue

In 2014, the graphic memoir Aivali created by the prolific comics artist with the pen name Soloùp was published in Greece with great success. His book constitutes a mosaic of personal experiences relating mainly to the cities of Aivali, Chania and the island of Lesbos. More precisely, Soloùp’s sequential art recounts his own personal experiences and reminiscences from a day trip in Aivali sometime in the 2000s, the autobiographical memories of three Greek authors that refer to their lives in the same city before and during the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor and the story of a Turkish young man, a family member of the Turkish writer Ahmet Yorulmaz, who resided in Chania until his settlement in Aivali in 1923. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which the spirit of community is revived, how the city of Aivali is socially reconstructed and finally, the manner in which community and space are connected with each other and also with social memory. The notions of community, space and social memory will be approached through the lens of classical sociology theories formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs.

In this article, I examine the notion of nostalgia in relation to the films of Theo Angelopoulos. I argue that the image of nostalgia that pervades his films does not call for the restoration of the past but rather lends itself to a sense of hope which I approach as an image of utopia. Drawing a line of comparison between Angelopoulos and the Greek poet George Seferis (who had a pivotal role in the shaping of a modern Greek identity and whose images of melancholy were recurrent points of reference for the director), I claim that Angelopoulos’s films are haunted by an image of utopia which is registered as a possibility in the present rather than an abstract projection into the future. Unlike Seferis’s nostalgia which is directly related to the fate of the nation, in Angelopoulos’s work the past returns to foreshadow a utopia beyond the frame of the nation state and away from the figuration of a one-way future projected by the capitalist social relations of the present.

Viewing the MasterChef Greece judges’ identities as mediatized, namely, as constructed via particular semiotic resources (linguistic, visual, spatial) mostly resulting from decisions made by the show’s production, we examine the communicative and social functions of the show as being a popular example of a reality TV programme. The judges hold a crucial role, as their assessment affects the subsequent development of the show. By adopting a micro-level discourse analytical approach, we focus on the analysis of two interactions, in which two different judge personas emerge, namely the ‘harsh’ and the ‘supportive’ judge. The analysis of these interactions indicates that the two personas serve the judges’ mediatized identities as both professional chefs (expertise) and TV presenters (suspense, viewers’ engagement). Yet, they are related to contrasting constructions of both the culinary (authority vs. mentoring, hegemonic vs. ‘soft’ masculinity) and the (reality) TV world (negative vs. positive emotionality). Both personas seem to relate to the broader Greek sociocultural context, such as the gendered ideologies and the politeness strategies prevailing in Greek society. However, while the ‘harsh’ judge persona reflects more overt and traditional forms of control and regulation, based on surveillance and suppression, the ‘supportive’ judge persona echoes the more covert technologies of governance of late modernity, based on self-reflexivity and emotionalism.

The present study explores the broad alternative media realm, employing the metaphor of media ecology to address the intersection between varieties of activism and different media, and draws on the mediation paradigm to explore the appropriation of digital media by diverse alternative media producers. At the empirical level, the study evaluates the positions and tactics of Greek grassroots media in the age of the social web probing grassroots media producers’ discourses and concerns over the employment of digital technologies. It reflects on controversial issues raised in regard to the enhancement and enrichment of the media-locus of resistance in the digital era, and discusses challenges and limitations raised by the employment of corporate social media in the Greek alternative mediascape.

Review of: Techni kai psychropolemiki diplomatia: Diethneis eikastikes ektheseis stin Athina (1950–1967) (‘Art and Cold War diplomacy: International art exhibitions in Athens [1950–1967]’), Areti Adamopoulou (2019)

Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 420 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-60122-444-2, p/bk, €32.00

Review of: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid Pro Quo?, Gonda Van Steen (2019)

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 323 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-47213-158-7, h/bk, $94.95

ISBN 978-0-47203-881-7, p/bk, $39.95

Zitountai paidia apo tin Ellada: Yiothesies stin Ameriki tou Psychrou Polemou, Gonda Van Steen (2021) (Trans. Ariadne Loukakou)

Athens: Potamos, 520 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-60545-173-8, p/bk, €25.20

Review of: Agnosti Chora: Ellada kai Dysi stis Arches tou 20ou Aiona (‘Unknown country: Greece and the west at the beginning of the twentieth century’), Effi Gazi (2020)

Athens: Polis, 354 pp.,

ISBN 978-960-435-735-2, p/bk, €20