The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities 9780755622337, 9781845114879

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If all books with a title page and an author’s name are autobiographical, then, under those criteria, this is one too. In that it tells the story of the formation of national and transnational identities through the use of the idea of Greece, it is also autobiographical in a more conventional way for me, a Greek raised and living between Greece, Australia, and the USA: it tells the story of my attempts at belonging. Neither Greek nor Australian nor American, yet all of the above not only through citizenship but also through culture, I am an example of how in our age of migrancy, exile, diaspora, the word translation seems to have come full circle and reverted from its figurative literary meaning of an interlingual transaction to its etymological physical meaning of locational rupture (µεταφορα). I experienced locational rupture early on but I began thinking about it much later, when, as a graduate student at Stanford’s English department, I wrote my thesis on the use of culture in the production of national narratives in the age of multinational capital. I am grateful for the intellectual guidance of my teachers at the time, especially Regenia Gagnier, Russell Berman, and Gayatri Spivak. That early work provided the theoretical foundation for this book. The material foundation was the result of a grant from Emerson College that allowed me to use Harvard’s libraries for my research. For their critical support I am grateful to: Yiorgos Chouliaras, Robert Dulgarian, Gerald MacLean, Geeta Patel, Kriss Ravetto, and Anindyo Roy. Many people provided the emotional foundation that sustained me through this book: Alexandros, Katina, and Kostas

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Koundouras kept me focused on why I was writing it; Yiannis Pappos encouraged me when I questioned its ever coming to light; and Yiorgos Chouliaras took it for granted that it would. Shankar Raman, Diana Henderson, Emilia Dubicki, Iason Lazaridis, Odysseas Kollias, Andreas Kilimiris, Loel Westermann, Flora Gonzalez and Saul Slapikoff all provided much needed breaks, intellectual and not. Julia Henderson provided her excellent typesetting skills. I thank them all. Fragments of this book in early versions were published as follows: “Between Orientalism and Philhellenism: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Real’ Greeks,” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 45/3 (2004): 249-264; “Finding One’s Way Home: ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and Diasporic Identity,” Henry Jenkins, Tara MacPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, Fall 2002); “Future Agonistes: The Practice of Criticism/The Politics of Reading in the Age of ‘Posts’,” Theodora Tsimpouki and Angeliki Spiropoulou, eds, Culture Agonistes (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002); “Reoccupying the Space of Culture: Greece and the Postcolonial Critique of Modernity,” Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 6:2 (Spring 2002): 77-91; “The Limits of Civility: Culture, Nation, and Modernity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” Colby Quarterly (June 2001): 164-173.

INTRODUCTION

On New Times

The history of modernity’s antique dreams is to be found in the writing out of the colonial and postcolonial moment. --Homi Bhabha1

Ever since the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, and his argument that the new is not only possible but inevitable, there has been an abundance of “new times.” For years now, scholars have been “trying to detect the incidence of interruptions” beneath “the great continuities of thought” in order to “suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time.”2 Their success is evident in the number of “posts” so prolific today: postmarxism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-modernity. Are these times new, however, or are they merely the products of the abstraction of the logical process of change from its concrete historical determinants? The later has been the view of many, mostly Marxist, theorists, especially of postmodernity, the most recent of new times.3 Postmodern theory’s construction of the time of the present as an epistemological structure, and its subsequent narrativization of social ethics and subject formation, would appear to prove them right. It is precisely these elements, though, which also inhabit their critique of postmodernity and make that critique subject to its own logic.4

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This paradoxical doubling, or inherently dialectical quality, is what makes modernity both so irresistible and so problematic a category. It also ushers in the problem of modernity’s legitimacy, latent, Hans Blumenberg tells us, in its “claim to carry out a radical break with tradition and in the incongruity between this claim and the reality of history, which can never begin entirely anew.”5 “Modernity,” he writes in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age—one of the most original re-thinkings of both the substance and the process of Western intellectual history—“was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in so doing, simultaneously created the other epochs.”6 It is in the nature of modernity to self-propagate, he continues, because it distances itself even from the most recent past with which it is identified. This explains the current multiplicity in the field of knowledge, but it does not automatically make all “posts” new. Blumenberg addresses this problem through his concept of “re-occupation.” Arguing against the popular “secularization” thesis supported by most theorists of modernity, he tells us that modern philosophies of history do not break from but “re-occupy” earlier positions. He explicates this metaphor in terms of the contrast between “content” and “function.” “Totally heterogeneous contents,” he states, can “take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man’s interpretation of the world and himself.”7 He views the idea of progress, for example, neither as a secularized Christian idea nor as a modern idea affected by Christianity. In Blumenberg’s account, progress is essentially modern in its content (the initial idea of possible progress) but heavily affected by Christianity in the function that the content is forced to perform (the function of explaining the meaning and pattern of history as a whole). For Blumenberg, unlike Foucault, continuity underlies the change of epochs: a continuity of problems rather than solutions, of questions rather than of answers. Judging from its long history in the discourse of modernity, one such problem is that of Greece. For so long considered the stable measure of “our” time in the present yet—as I show through the history of its formation—a contradictory space, Greece continues to pose questions, especially for the critic who is interested in changing “the location of culture.”8 To change the location of culture is this book’s desire: this is why it

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“re-occupies” the much too familiar space of Greece. Inspired by postcolonial theory’s revision, it too wants to “slow down the linear progressive time of modernity” so that it can reveal “the pauses and stresses of the whole performance.”9 Cast as a protagonist in this performance, Greece has received mixed reviews. For some, it is a “historically tested utopianism” that functions as “the yardstick of our own self-knowledge.”10 For others, it is responsible for a number of our “currently most despised vices: sexism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, metaphysics, the verb ‘to be.’”11 The story of Greece that unfolds in The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities is more complicated than this. Told from the “in-between” position of a doubly migrated Greek, it includes not only the “history of modernity’s antique dreams” but also the nightmares that come along with them.12 Disturbances of Memory

Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder—the discovery of yourself. --Lawrence Durrell13

Caught between myth and history, Greece has long haunted the Western imagination. Yet it is a ghost whose presence has been as much in doubt as affirmed. Countless visitors, determined to get ocular proof of the spirit of Greece, have ended up sharing Freud’s reaction upon first catching sight of the Acropolis: “So all this really does exist, just as we learned at school!”14 Puzzled that he would question “the real existence of Athens,” he tried to make sense of it for himself. It was as if “the person who gave expression to the remark was divided,” he says, “from another person who took cognizance of [it]; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing.”15 He explains his initial reaction with the following example: “it was as if someone, walking besides Loch Ness, suddenly caught sight of the famous Monster stranded upon the shore and found himself driven to the admission: ‘So it really does exist, the sea serpent we always disbelieved in!’”16 His other astonishment, he tells us, was at his doubt: after all, the educated Freud “had been

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expecting some expression of delight or admiration” at the sight of the Acropolis, not one of disbelief. Freud wrote his “Disturbance of Memory On the Acropolis” in 1936, years after his 1904 visit. It is an essay in which he discusses “derealization.” He defines it as the displacement of the real from one’s own relation with the object on to the object itself or, as he says, “from my relation to the Acropolis on to the very existence of the Acropolis.”17 “Derealization” is the experience that typifies the West’s encounter of the idea and the territory of Greece. In the innumerable pages that document it—travel narratives, literary, historical texts—one thing is consistently clear: these accounts are inevitably always an analysis of the West’s relation to Greece and never about Greece itself, even as they displace that relation and name it Greek. “The West,” as David Lloyd reminds us, “is not merely descriptive but crucially productive, in that it directs the formation of the modern subject both in the geographical west and wherever the West has imposed its institutions.”18 Lawrence Durrell was right in telling us that Greece is a place that offers “you …the discovery of yourself.” What he did not explain was the degree to which Greece had to be displaced for that self to be discovered. In the 1990s, a few Greek scholars explored how the institution and the contemporary life of Greece in the Western imagination are part of the history of western Europe’s self-imagining.19 They also document how Greece is excluded from the very “legacy” that it is supposed to have produced. Their voices fall on deaf ears among the proponents of Western culture who, following tradition, “find themselves” in Greece. Given this fact, it appears that Hellenism, that modern ideological invention constructed primarily through and with the birth of philology, is alive and well.20 It may not have its old glory—after all, the West’s gaze has shifted elsewhere—but the institutions put in place by Hellenism continue to function as a means of negotiating the Western world’s (now calling itself transnational) own contemporary necessities. The most resilient of these institutions is criticism, the legacy of Classics nurtured by English studies.21 Its “Hellenic” past is evident in the idea of a common ground that haunts contemporary criticism even of the radical kind.22 This is why Fredric Jameson, a critic with a considerable radical reputation and with an interest in outlining “a

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genuinely dialectical attempt to think of our present of time in History,” seems to be collaborating with the repressive politics of postmodern cultural production whose power he has made it his project to expose and combat.23 In “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson attempts to explain this discrepancy in his position: The postmodern is the force field in which very different kinds of impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall into a view of history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.24

In his desire for historical effectiveness, Jameson ends up sounding very much like Matthew Arnold, who in the mid-nineteenth century proposed Hellenism as the cultural dominant that would stave off the confusion of barbarism.25 Of course, unlike Arnold, Jameson wants us to focus on the dominant so that an analysis of its power can unmask its repression of diversity. His unintentional collusion with Arnold, however, illustrates the problem with concentrating only on the dominant. As Gayatri Spivak points out, the difference between radical and conservative resistance to it is erased, an erasure she attributes to Jameson’s resistance to post-structuralism, which she sees as a result of his unmediated-by-present conditions Marxism.26 This contradiction in Jameson’s work poignantly demonstrates that in the process of defining cultures even in this “new” time of criticism, despite assertions of undermining progressive, singular development, the past can easily be interpolated into the present. In Jameson, this interpolation is evident in the residual “Hellenism” of his practice, that is, in his insistence on the need for a cultural dominant. Contemporary Anglo-American criticism’s “Hellenism” is evident in readings that, in their eagerness to undo Eurocentrism, conflate Greece’s modernity and antiquity. Such a conflation, as this book shows, is the province of Greek nationalists, nineteenthcentury Romantic idealists, and contemporary neo-conservatives. Its

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central characteristic is that it effectively erases the cultural reality of modern Greeks. In readings like Jameson’s, the erasure is performed not in the name of Hellenism and its belief in the metaphysical integrity of Greek culture through the ages. Rather, it is performed in the name of a postmodern multiculturalism that should include Greece and a postcolonialism of which Greece is also a part, even though, as some scholars have argued, it is a “colonization of the ideal” or a “crypto-colonialism.”27 Despite their desire for rupture, then, these critiques, even if by negation, end up bearing the burden of the discourse of continuity. So do the critiques that focus on modern Greek reality, most of which read it in the context of theories of development/progress. These critiques usually castigate Greece either for not succeeding or for trying to live up to the standards imposed by the discourse on culture that emerges in the modern era of the West, a discourse which, ironically, uses Greece as the measure of its normative temporality. The victim of a “belated modernity,” Greece is seen as suffering from its too rapid adoption: over-industrialization, historical discontinuity, loss of identity.28 Robert Kaplan exemplifies this vision of Greece in Balkan Ghosts, his highly successful travel memoir. “The little house beside a plane tree,” he concludes in his particularly acerbic final chapter on Greece, “where Lawrence Durrell had once lived on the island of Rhodes, was now down the street from a virus of neon-advertised discos and fast-food joints, far uglier than any MacDonald’s arch.” Then, in an interesting reversal of the stereotypical portrayals of seduction between East and West, he quotes a nineteenth-century observer to make his final point: “‘The century was drawing to a close,’ writes Leon Sciaky about the Salonika of a hundred years ago. ‘Stealthily the West was creeping in, trying to lure the East with her wonders.’ This time, I felt, she might succeed.”29 It is not only tourists or self-appointed critics from the West who decry the modernization they see in the streets of Athens (or, worse still, of the villages). This kind of censure is also a commonplace among the Greeks. Nikos Mouzelis, a leading Marxist social theorist, conceives the history of modern Greek society as a series of exterior

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interventions and elements of “foreign” heritage all of which have produced the desire for the international prestige of bourgeois regularity so commonplace in Greece today.30 He reproaches Greece for this desire and blames the severing of “organic links between native and imported institutions” for its pervasive presence in Greek culture.31 Greece can overcome the anxiety over its belatedness, he argues, only by “transcending the contradictions of both peripheral and metropolitan capitalism.” It can achieve this transcendence “by finding and following new developmental strategies” that are rooted in the marriage of old and new, native and imported institutions.32 Like many in the current debates around globalization, Mouzelis wants to concentrate on modes of resistance to its alibis of progress/modernization. He very intelligently focuses on marginality—the context within which the notion of “development” is agonistically theorized. He then uses the concept of “underdevelopment” not with its usual connotations of “backwardness” but with the denotation of a substantively different social condition.33 The problem with his argument, however, as with most strictly Marxist accounts, is that it subscribes to a hierarchical conceptual system in which modernization and capitalist industrialization are both the theoretical core and the trajectory of political practice.34 For him only capitalist relations of production can make possible the existence of autonomous worker’s organizations, for example, and, much in the same way, only “development” leads to modes of resistance to it. Herein lies the contradiction in his argument: he decries Greece’s modernization when, for him, modernization is the only means out of its perceived “belatedness.” It is clear from this brief account of the various critical “takes” on it that Greece is not only central but also offers valuable lessons to the critic interested in thinking “our present of time in History.”35 Whether one reads it as the origin or uses it to argue the end of Western culture, locates it at the center of the critical discourse on historical modernity and its epistemological structures, or points to it as an experiment on the margins, it remains the axis around which a number of modernity’s workings of subject formation are staged: Oriental/European, ancient/modern, civilized/barbaric, metropoli-

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tan/peripheral, dominant/diverse. I focus on this axial condition with the aim of opening up an analytical space that will enable the critic who is interested in destabilizing these binaries to negotiate the heterogeneity that they have been masking. It is a difficult task because of Greece’s long history as the West’s “familiar.” The difficulty increases when one realizes, as I have shown with the example of Jameson, that the very tools through which one undertakes this task are themselves integrally connected with this history. “Re-occupying” their function hones these tools. Inquiring into the history of Greece’s construction as the stable place of the West’s identity formation lays open the tension between its mythic status and its precarious history in the interstices of East and West. Such an unmasking challenges the West’s chronology, “de-forms” its articulations in the discourses that constitute one’s social place (nationality, culture, etc), and accentuates the contingency of fictions of origin.36 The Politics of Location

No nation now but the imagination.

--Derek Walcott

As an axis, the particularity of Greece is conceivable only in terms of its location within a wider range of historical formations. Hence, by necessity, this study is a history of transnational traces and it cannot help but be symptomatic. It spans large chronological and geographical spaces, 1720s to contemporary England, Greece, Australia, the USA. By reading Greece as an axis, and not in the Romantic, current tourist, or Greek nationalist way as a place that is transformative in and of itself, my project locates itself in the middle of the debates of what in recent criticism has been termed “the politics of location”—the understanding that a place on the map is also a place in history.37 As Caren Kaplan explains in Questions of Travel, the term “the politics of location” has been adopted by cultural critics “as a useful way to articulate the concerns of regional, particular, and local interests in a number of different fields and disciplines.”38 The general terms with which critics working on the contradictory and complex workings of location imagine the

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concept of “place” are well known in Euro-American criticism: “displacement,” “diaspora,” “hybridity,” “alterity,” “marginality.” We must negotiate the competing memberships, allegiances, values and involvements that characterize our experience of place, these critics tell us, by destabilizing unexamined or stereotypical images of “home,” historicizing differences and similarities, and “creating alternative histories, identities, and possibilities for alliances.”39 Destabilizing unexamined images of “home,” Ian Chambers adds, leads us away from nostalgic dreams of “going home” to a mythic, metaphysical location and into the realm of theorizing a way of “being at home” that accounts for “the myths we know to be myths yet continue to cling to, cherish and dream” alongside “other stories, other fragments of memory and traces of time.”40 Imagining home in this way can be very liberating. It steers one away from the sentimental trap of nationalism and the narrowness of monocultural belonging. Given the fact, however, that—as at least four centuries of travel show—this deconstructive attitude towards “home” has been part of the ideology of “Europeanness,” and given also the degree to which metaphors of place are ubiquitous in EuroAmerican criticism, one has to be wary of how they may become the source of the latest re-conceptualizations of the Western European and American “self.”41 As the historical material in this book shows, much in the same way that in the discourse of Hellenism “Greekness” was understood as a universal ontological condition, so too the historical experience of displacement can be essentialized as universal in euphoric and unpoliticized celebrations of diversity.42 Whereas in the eyes of Percy Shelley and Matthew Arnold we were all “Greeks,” now we are all “nomads,” “displaced,” “hybrids.” The broadness of the image of displacement is critically tempting. Its historically unspecific use, however, can end up consolidating the very identity one wants to dismantle. In connecting recent critical negotiations of displacement with an earlier project of universal subject formation in which Greece was a structuring ideological signifier and in arguing that it was an unstable signifier to begin with, I do not want to impose closure on current contestations of its legitimacy by claiming faithfulness to its “original” moment. Rather, I show how the genealogical coincidence

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of Hellenism and criticism demands that criticism’s history in the discourse of universalizing humanism be crossed with its current life. In so doing, I am following a growing number of critics who argue that the unhistoricized use of terms like “diaspora,” “exile,” “immigration,” etc., can produce a general, oversimplified theory of the ethnic subject and leave unquestioned the critic’s own subjectposition.43 The purpose of my proposed crossing is not to cleanse criticism of its genealogy. Rather, it is to help the critic who is interested in representing difference steer away from the misconception that she is outside the pedagogical circuit of a discourse—the discourse of the West—a crucial moment in whose formation was the institution of Greece as origin. Such a misconception is common among critics who represent themselves as authentically particular or local. They usually consolidate their position with an anti-cosmopolitanism that, Bruce Robbins tells us, “provides no escape from or political alternative to the realm of the professional.”44 Cosmopolitanism, however, according to Aijaz Ahmad, provides too easy an escape, usually at the expense of those who cannot write or speak for themselves.45 A glimpse at the history of the figure of the much celebrated and much maligned cosmopolitan intellectual clarifies my position, explains my use of “auto-ethnography,” and demonstrates the fruitfulness of crossing criticism’s history with its current life. Juxtaposing this history with the present slows down the quick tendency to view cosmopolitan intellectuals as representatives of “their people.” It also helps us realize that they are only representatives of their training that, more often than not, is similar to the Western cultural establishment’s. At the same time, looking at the history of the figure of the cosmopolitan intellectual slows down the tendency to dismiss the inevitable generalization in which any intellectual work is inescapably involved. First coined by Diogenes Laertius as a means of overcoming the usual dualism Hellene/Barbarian, “cosmopolite” came to mean “Hellene” nevertheless. With him, an initially spatial distinction—a Hellene was a person from the Greek city-states—came to be deployed horizontally as a universal criterion of differentiation: a Hellene was a person with sufficient education to speak proper

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11

Greek. This is why, much like today’s cosmopolitan intellectuals (new immigrant or postcolonial), Diogenes Laertius can describe himself as “apolis” (lacking a state), “aoikos” (lacking a home), or “patridos hesteramenos” (lacking a homeland) without the danger of being seen as a Barbarian.46 This description consolidates his “Greekness” or “Hellenism,” that is, his professional training, and articulates a complex notion of identity in which “Greekness” is neither only a matter of location nor of training. This is the subject position from which I speak in this book. Part of what Homi Bhabha calls the “ethics of self-enactment” that should inform interrogations of the present, The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities documents my transnational attempts, both intellectual and personal, at negotiating “Hellenism.”47 Chapter One, “A Historical Non-place,” charts the theoretical terrain of this negotiation. In such accounts as Henri Lefebvre’s Introduction to Modernity, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Homi Bhabha’s “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” I trace the remains of modernity’s “Hellenism.” I argue that, rather than cleansing themselves of these remains in their search for a “truly” new vision of the future, such revisions need to observe the heterogeneity hidden in them. Only then can they change the function—of inscribing the spatial logic of social differences across a common temporal frame—that their critique is forced to perform. Chapter Two, “Mapping the Real (in) Greece,” examines the cultural terrain that produced Greece as a transnational artifact. I study English travelers’ “discovery” of Greece in the late eighteenth century, locate their narratives in the context of the rise of fiction and its formal sign, realism, and show how they were instrumental in creating the “reality” of Greece. Eighteenth-century and, following the form, early nineteenth-century travel narratives and novels on Greece were filled with circumstantial properties—selfgenerated projected images of otherness—that writers from Montagu to Byron to Mary Shelley needed to see themselves in. The “realism” of these accounts, I argue, using histories of the rise of fiction, guaranteed not only the fictionality of Greece but also the “originality” of these fictions. As a realist fiction, the story of Greece, like other realist fictions of the time, had to be about

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nobody in particular so that it could be understood as an original fiction, that is, as belonging to the author. Being nobody’s left it open to the reader’s sentimental appropriation. I read the rise of Philhellenism in this context and argue that, like Orientalism, it was a particularly self-serving enterprise: a means for these travelers and their culture to write themselves in the discourse of Hellenism and the Greeks out as its ruins. Chapter Three, “Producing the Nation’s Narrative,” explores the ways in which the newly free modern Greece erased its difference and defined its identity as (and through) the “Hellenic.” I read key documents from the time of Greece’s institution as a nation-state and find that, in the eyes of the European educated diasporic bourgeoisie that are its “founding fathers,” Greece’s reality is dependent on its fictionality. This being the case, modern Greece cannot help but see itself as a “state of mind” and the Hellenic as the “transnational style” that its cultural imaginary must conform to, if it wants to be called national.48 “Hellenism,” then, I conclude, is always another’s discourse, even when it presents itself as the nation’s own. Chapter Three traces the repercussions of this fantasy in the discourse on citizenship, its inclusion and exclusions both in the history of Greece and in its current negotiation of its transnational identity within Europe. Chapter Four, “Other Hellenisms: Crossing the Boundaries of the National,” examines the contradictions in negotiating Hellenism at a time when most world culture is contemplating itself in transnational terms. As the examples from late-nineteenth-century Greek state policy illustrate, the practice of “Hellenism,” the externalization of Greece beyond its geographical boundaries to its historical ones, can be a nationalist insularity. The effects of such a nationalism, however, are very different when they are practiced by Greek immigrants as a means of negotiating citizenship in their different homelands—Australia, Germany, the USA, UK, South Africa, among many. Australia is my representative example in this chapter. In Australia “Hellenism” does not have the same “universalist” currency for Greeks as it does for Australians who use it to claim their civility. Rather, this chapter argues, it is the means through which Greeks are excluded from an Australian national/cultural

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13

imaginary anxious to embrace its modernity and forget its earlier non-multiculturalist past together with the pasts of its “new” Australians.49 Australia’s “Hellenism” is the new/old cosmopolitanism (in Australia’s instance called multiculturalism) that requires its citizens, in the words of Diogenes Laertius, to be “lacking a homeland.” Only then can the national question be posed more strongly than ever and the national/cultural boundaries be secured more insidiously than ever in Australia’s history. The Hellenism of the Greeks, especially the one that incorporates the “Eastern” and “barbaric” or Orientalist kind, has no place in this story of nationhood. Yet, this chapter concludes, its narrative function in the story of Australian nationhood serves to remind Australia that its “Hellenicity” is already Other. That is, that it was produced by navigation and settlement from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century and that Australia, like Greece, has its own history of negotiating Europe: it inhabits “Western civilization” yet it does not inhabit “Europe,” it both is and is not a history of the “West,” it is certainly not a history of “Europe” even as officially it is a history of “Europeans.” The negotiation of “Hellenism” in this context becomes a way of mapping displacement even as it creates it.

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RE-OCCUPYING THE SITE OF THE MODERN

Myth or History?

What creature has only one voice, walks sometimes on two legs, on three, sometimes on four, and which, contrary to the general law of nature, is at its weakest when it uses the most legs? --Sphinx

“Man” answered Oedipus, and so begins, in Western culture’s fiction of origin at least, the history of man.1 His answer is “the only ideal and the only idea of man’s possibilities,” this fiction tells us.2 The Sphinx’s riddle is also my beginning, but, unlike Oedipus, I am not interested in its solution. Nor am I interested in the maintenance of his. Rather, following Walter Benjamin’s advice in “Riddle and Mystery,” I want to explore the riddle’s “precondition.”3 For, as Benjamin explains, “the key to the riddle is not only its solution, as the thing that thwarts it, but also its intention...its foundation and the ‘resolution’ of the intent to puzzle that is concealed in it.”4 Concealed in the Sphinx’s riddle is both the monster herself and the story of Greece’s alterity. It is this alterity’s suppression, and not the “questions about reason and discourse,” which produces “the nightmares, the forebodings of imminent catastrophe” that preeminent theorists of modernity, like Henri Lefebvre, find accompany dreams of Greece as “the original source.”5 Although part of the myth of Oedipus, the Sphinx’s story is not included in the national/cultural lineage of Hellenism (and west-

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ward-looking Neohellenism) that equates Hellene with “man” and makes Hellenism an ontological condition of the fictions of origin of both the West and Greece. Unlike the story of the man with which she is linked, the Sphinx’s story has been posited as unsignifiable. Hence it is read as part of the mythos and not the logos of the Greeks, that is, as part of the nightmare and not the utopian dream of Hellenicity and its promise of totality.6 As with all nightmares, every effort has been made either to rationalize or to forget it. Yet its memory persists. It is found in the West’s anxiety over its otherness, in Greece’s anxiety over its Europeanness, in what Homi Bhabha calls the “time-lag” of modernity—the metonymic slippages in the narrative strategies of nations and cultures. It is what he has identified as one of the “interstitial” instances in the narrative of modernity that offer us glimpses of the “what might have been” or the “what could have been” and, through this process, “keep alive the making of the past.”7 Such is the function of myths, Marina Warner tells us in her book Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. They “offer a lens which can be used to see human identity in its social and cultural context.”8 Deeply aware of their ambiguous power, Warner explains: they can lock us up in stock reactions, bigotry and fear, but they are not immutable, and by unpicking them, the stories can lead to others. Myths convey values and expectations which are always evolving, in the process of being formed, but—and this is fortunate—never set so hard they cannot be changed again.9

Unlike other cultural critics who wrote on myth, such as Claude Levi-Strauss or Roland Barthes, Warner does not believe that myth is something that happens behind our backs.10 And, unlike Fredric Jameson, she does not view the loss of a sense of originality and authenticity in current myths as a source of regret.11 Instead, she insists that we have the capacity, as tellers and re-tellers, interpreters and re-interpreters, to maintain the interaction between myth and history. “Every telling of a myth,” she writes, “is part of that myth; there is no Ur-version, no authentic prototype, no true account.”12 Myth, in this context, is an interplay which dramatizes our cultural

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memories and our traditions as historical interpretations rather than idolizing them as timeless dogmas. This is the understanding of myth that I bring to bear in recounting that of the Sphinx. In reading it, I take Benjamin’s advice to explore “the intent to puzzle” that is concealed in riddles. For this myth is about riddles. “Riddles,” Benjamin explains, “appear where there is an emphatic intention to elevate an artifact or an event that seems to contain nothing at all, or nothing out of the ordinary, to the plane of symbolic significance.”13 And, he continues: “Since mystery dwells at the heart of symbol, an attempt will be made to uncover a ‘mysterious’ side to this artifact or event.” The mystery, however, is not inherent in the object but is found in the work of the subject that produces the riddle through its solution. This is why Benjamin asks us to focus on the “‘resolution” of the intent to puzzle that is concealed in a riddle and not only on the solution. Because, he concludes, “in the final analysis, mystery can be thought only in the acts of the living being that carries them out, not in things.”14 The story of the Sphinx is shrouded in mystery—each of its retellings betrays its narrator’s attempts to conceal her. Not much is known of her besides the fact that she was the means through which Oedipus could articulate the nature of man. Her role in the story of Oedipus thus predetermined, she becomes an outsider, a footnote, in the story of “man,” famous only for her riddle. Oedipus’ answer marks the place of humanity from which she is excluded by her monstrosity. Ironically, however, his answer also marks his similarity with the Sphinx. As the modern classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant argues, “it is his victory over her that turns Oedipus not into the solution that he guessed, but the very question posed, not a man like other men but a creature of confusion and chaos,” a monster just like her.15 This “familial” relationship between Oedipus and the Sphinx is supported by the version recounted by Pausanias in which she is the bastard daughter of Laius, Oedipus’ father. He writes: Because he [Laius] was fond of her, [he] told her the oracle that was delivered to Cadmus from Delphi. No one, they say, except

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the kings, knew the oracle. Now Laius (the story goes on to say) had sons by concubines, and the oracle delivered applied only to Epicasta and her sons. So when any of her brothers came in order to claim the throne from the Sphinx, she resorted to trickery in dealing with them, saying that if they were the sons of Laius they should know the oracle that came to Cadmus. When they could not answer, she would punish them with death, on the ground that they had no valid claim to the kingdom or to the relationship. But Oedipus came because it appears he had been told the oracle in a dream.16

Here we see her testing all the king’s sons in order to distinguish the nothoi (bastards/fakes) from the gnesioi (legitimate/authentic). She kills all of them except Oedipus who, with his experience in his stepfather Polybus’ court, shares her monstrous genealogy as both gnesios and nothos. He is Laius’ legitimate son but an illegitimate Theban—the only legitimate Thebans being the autochthonoi who sprang out of the earth from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, Oedipus’ ancestor and the founder of Thebes. She is Laius’ illegitimate daughter but, having sprung from the earth also, according to another version of the myth, a legitimate Theban. It is interesting that in Sophocles’ tragedy, the account through which she was made famous, none of this is mentioned, the Sphinx is simply the “horrible singer” who asks the riddle that leads to Oedipus’ rise and fall.17 Hers, however, as the above account of the crevices in which she is hidden illustrates, is not the riddle of man but the riddle of the autochthonous’ occlusion by man. That is the “intention” or the “precondition” of her riddle and it is the nightmare inherited with the myths of Greece, the source of “forebodings about imminent catastrophe.” In building the house of Western culture through “our dialogue with Greece,” “we,” Europeans, have ignored or forgotten the Sphinx’s riddle, that is, the “preconditions” of its foundation.18 Lefebvre asks in Introduction to Modernity, “Can the myth of Oedipus reveal the hidden depths of being, of thought and of history?”19 The answer is yes, but not if it is linked only to the discourse of Hellenism that posits Greece as “the original source,” “the yardstick against which we measure our

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own self-knowledge.”20 Linked also with the story of the Sphinx’s occlusion, “the hidden depths of history” that Lefebvre finds are revealed in this myth, is the political nature of such fictions of origin. How else would one interpret its careful obliteration of the Sphinx whose legitimacy is encrypted in the nebulous genealogical connection with Oedipus? An Historical Non-place

When we question Greece, we are questioning a historically tested utopianism. --Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity

For Lefebvre “Greece alone caught a glimpse of the total man, vitality, reason, harmony—and let them slip away.”21 For him, then, the “bad dreams” that come along with its myths are not because of Greece’s presence in our psyche but rather because of the memory of its absence. That absence and the dreams and nightmares it produces are “what is left over” after all “distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis...defined as a totality.”22 This “left-over” Lefebvre calls the “everyday” and defines it, in Critique of Everyday Life, as that which is most phenomenologically familiar, hence least differentiated, and sociologically residual. In other words, the everyday and the dreams of Greece, in that they too for him are “left-overs,” are synonymous. They haunt and define modernity. Consistently throughout the process of modernity’s constitution—either as the specific “antiquity” or the more general “tradition”—Greece has figured as the universal that Europe needed to signify either an irreversible break from, or to project a movement forward towards, in its process of self-totalization. The examples are countless. In England, from the late eighteenth century when it began to displace Rome as the point of origin of English culture to the nineteenth century when, as cultural fantasy, it served as its model, Greece was constantly evoked as the historical abstraction that ensured the concreteness of English “civility.”23 In the USA today, despite the efforts of multiculturalist and postcolonial-

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ist critics to question the universal validity of Eurocentric norms, Greece still tends to represent “our civility.” Neo-conservative public intellectuals and conservative critics see the efforts of multiculturalism as a direct attack on patriotism, democracy, and civilization. They argue that “despite our many differences, we hold in common an intellectual, artistic, and moral legacy, descending largely from the Greeks and the Bible, [that] preserves us from chaos and barbarism.”24 Historians, philosophers, writers project onto the past a Greece of their imagination, itself a product of that past, hence a warranted anachronism and a way for history to perform one of its most important functions: that of enacting society’s continuity or, as Reinhardt Koselleck puts it, of “affirm[ing] our consciousness of a shared experience over generations of an external and real world.”25 Located in this impossible position, a marker of the real yet also a fantasy, Greece is an instance of what Michel de Certeau calls the “originary non-place” from which all historiographical projects begin.26 Greece as “non-place” is the structural category of historical analysis with which the West’s myth of progress was rendered into logos. It is the way Europe “realized’ itself: Greece’s logos, the mythos of its idiom, was taken “for the universal form of that [which Europe] must still wish to call Reason.”27 Greece is also the category with which current postcolonial demystifications of that logos (embedded as they are in it, even as its negation) map their ideal future.28 Thus, when exploring “the history of modernity’s antique dreams” in an attempt to rethink modernity, we must look at not only “the writing out of the colonial and postcolonial moment,” as suggested by Homi Bhabha, but also the writing in of “antiquity.”29 As the story of the Sphinx’s occlusion paradigmatically demonstrates, it too contains erasures. Of the many examples available with which to support this point, I will trace this function of Greece in two of the most influential critiques of the historiography of modernity: Henri Lefebvre’s Introduction to Modernity and Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s work is one of the founding texts of postcolonial contra-modernity. Lefebvre’s is part of the discourse which rethinks the modern as the “everyday”—he was instrumental in inaugurating this discourse in his concretizing of Marx’s concept of alienation as “critical knowledge of the

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everyday”—and, as such, a forerunner of cultural studies.30 Both critics’ work addresses the production and temporalization of history by and as modernity not only as an existential but also a social condition embedded in material processes. Yet both stumble when it comes to Greece. “Greece alone concerns us,” writes Henri Lefebvre in Introduction to Modernity, his highly poetic attempt “to think” the modern.31 “Our dialogue with other eras,” he continues, “with India or the Orient, is marginal....Greece, the original source, offers the only ideal and the only idea of man’s possibilities....Greece is the yardstick against which we measure our own self-knowledge.” I hardly need to mention the large body of work (mostly from postcolonial studies) that shows the centrality of the dialogue with India and the Orient in Europe’s self-constitution. I also hardly need to mention the equally large body of work on Greece as origin, the litany of which is much too long and all too familiar. I will repeat the crux of it using Lefebvre as the mouthpiece: It was Greece which created historical thought and political thought. Greek philosophers discovered active reason, based on social praxis. They gave language a form; they elaborated its theoretical and practical categories. By mediating on its social and political effectiveness, they brought the essentials of social and political praxis to the logos....They also sensed the limits of the logos. They posed all the problems. They tried all the directions.32

According to Lefebvre’s listing of its virtues, Greece was “modern,” before all of “us.” Sounding quite Habermasian in his definition of modernity as autonomous reason, he tells us that, for a brief moment at least, Greece had “confidence in the universal logos and in the power of the rational.”33 Yet he also tells us that it is the tradition against which we define our modernity. It is “a vast, imaginary screen,” the “region of the past” with which “we” define “our present age” in the hopes of founding a “new Greece.”34 Here, in this contradiction between modernity as qualitative (universal) and modernity as chronological, Lefebvre betrays his argument of

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Greece’s modernity as his own and performs what Foucault calls “the most touching of treasons:” he suppresses the very question of the “historicity of the thought of the universal,” that is, he suppresses the idea that the West’s understanding of the universal (despite its claims to universality) is particular.35 Ironically, Lefebvre’s work’s aim is to trace this very historicity. Both Introduction to Modernity and the larger project of which it is a part—his Critique of Everyday Life, a project that he pursued for over fifty years and which has now become one of the foundational texts of cultural studies—have as their political aim the social production of possibility at the level of historical time, that is, the time of the everyday.36 Rethinking, and concretizing, the early Marx’s concept of alienation as “critical knowledge of everyday life,” Lefebvre defines the everyday as not only that which is most familiar, and hence least differentiated, but also as that which is sociologically residual.37 The everyday, he writes in Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I, is “profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground.38 As such, the everyday is the underlying phenomenological unity that accompanies all differentiation, providing it with social meaning. Everyday life, for Lefebvre, however, must not be understood solely at the phenomenal level nor reduced to the properties of macro-systems (and this is his differentiation from Marx). He strives to overcome such dualisms. He argues that we need to transform abstract thought, the prototypical mode of Western philosophical and scientific reasoning, into a “dialectical consciousness of life, in life: unity of the mediate and immediate, of the abstract and concrete, of culture and natural spontaneity.”39 The everyday for him—and this is his innovation embraced by cultural studies—is the partially realized universality of an historically produced species-being (or human community), and not the abstract, but realized, universality of its alienated forms (money, the commodity, the state, etc.) with which it can be confused.40 In Introduction to Modernity, the metaphor for this real, yet radically incomplete, universality is Greece. “Greece alone,” he writes, “caught a glimpse of the total man, vitality, reason, harmony—and let them

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slip away.” It is important to note here that Lefebvre, in presenting Greece in this way, is not nostalgic for some unified concept of selfhood and being in society that he thinks existed in Greece that he wants to see reconstituted in a future utopia.41 He does not regard Greece as a homogeneous whole, but rather as complex and internally divided.42 This is why, for Lefebvre, Greece functions both as a realized, hence alienated, abstraction against which “we” define ourselves, and a concrete, though fleeting, example of the unalienated universality of the “good” universal, that is, the unrealized universality of the species. He goes into the realm of culture to make his point. Defining ourselves against this realized abstraction, he tells us, leads to classicism and its various fetishizations of “Greece.”43 At the same time, as an example of the good universal, this abstraction powers romanticism, that is, the desire for disalienation. He defines classicism and romanticism not only narrowly as artistic movements but as “totalities.” A totality, for him, is a partially realized system of thought, an “ensemble of differences.”44 History, for Lefebvre, is a totality, one that we can never theorize in its entirety. Instead, we can only grasp what he calls “moments,” flashes of perception into the range of historical possibilities that are embedded in the totality of being, but which cannot be disentangled from the activities of everyday life. Romanticism and classicism are just such moments: they are not only periods of literary history, but of history, period. Both are expressions of the residue, that is, the phenomenological unity, which makes up everyday life. “Without some kind of concrete unity,” Lefebvre explains, “neither classicism nor romanticism could have created the aesthetic ‘world’ they needed in which to exercise their own creativity.”45 As the underlying unity (the “yardstick”) that accompanies all differentiation and furnishes it with its social meaning, Greece provides classicism and romanticism with their identity. For classicism, “it is the goal, something to be achieved by the struggles of passion and imagination. It is recognizable and repeatable.” For romanticism, it “remains a possibility, and nothing more.” In both instances, Greece is the realized abstraction that allows the present

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to take its shape as a partially realized totality that needs to be “presented,” that is, “made present.”46 In so doing, Greece continues to bring “social and political praxis to the logos.”47 For Lefebvre, then, the example of Greece helps us analyze dialectical movements, like the one found in the conflictive relationship between classicism and romanticism. In doing so, it helps restore “vitality, harmony, and reason” in our present time. It also frees modernity from mystifications like the ones found in all sorts of modernisms. Lefebvre uses Greece to take issue with purely epistemological symbolizations of the present, which he sees as unhistoricized universalism. “This period which sees and calls itself entirely new,” he complains, “is overcome by an obsession with the past: memory, history….Historical becoming is immediately upon us, and immediately it becomes history.”48 “We are overloaded with fragmented pieces of unarticulated information, the debris of the past, knowledge as scrap-yard.”49 “Myths are back,” he continues, “and with them the philosophy of myths and reflection of myths. No one seems to see the disconcerting aspects of it all: a reliance on a form of thought and a profound sensibility which, though uprootable, is untransplantable.”50 And, finally, showing his strong critique of unhistoricized universalism, or classicism without the contradiction of romanticism, he writes: “classicism turns myths into allegories; it freezes them to death.”51 How ironic that, despite his criticism of such a process, he also allegorizes Greece, literally creates it as the space of the other, the “mythic zero” of modernity’s (and his own) historiographical project, the thing that allows him to “present” modernity. For the Marxist Lefebvre, “presenting” atemporality is of the utmost importance because, in its dialectic with the partially realized universality of the everyday, it rehistoricizes experience and drives away the abstraction that leads to alienation. This disruption of atemporality, however, together with the hoped for “presenting,” can also lead to the retrospective construction of images of the integrity of the past. His argument of the “totality” of Greece is one instance of such retrospection. Greece for him is at once empirical and utopian. It is empirical in that it offers a critique of everyday life in the present and utopian in that it harbors the promise of a concrete

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universality. For Lefebvre, Greece’s power lies in the disjunction between these two aspects. Yet, I would add, this is where its misrepresentations lie also. Lefebvre’s misrepresentation is obvious in the contradiction between his insistence on Greece’s historical specificity and his treatment of it as an abstraction, and an alienated one at that. How else would one explain “all the bad dreams, the nightmares, the forebodings about imminent catastrophe” that he sees together with his vision of the myth of Greece? Postcolonial theory has analyzed these nightmares as the return of the repressed and uncanny past, the product of “the writing out of the colonial and postcolonial moment” from “the history of modernity’s antique dreams.”52 As with all analysis, however, there is always the risk of counter-transference and the reinstitution of the nightmare, the reinscription of modernity’s antique dreams as the visions of the future. Recent universal applications of “postcoloniality” and their conflation of internal and the various different heritages and operations of colonization in the rest of the world are among such reinscriptions. Yet the stories of the postcolonial world, Gayatri Spivak among others notes, are not necessarily the same as the stories coming from “‘internal colonization’—the patterns of exploitation and domination of disenfranchised groups within the United States.”53 Only if the liminal space of the postcolonial remains exterior to history—a utopian “non-place”—can it provide the perspective of a completed whole (without the predetermination of the teleological end of progressivism) from which the present can appear as radically incomplete. When it becomes part of history, it suffers the fate of Greece, whose record as a “historically tested utopianism” (as we saw in Lefebvre) was the means through which Western modernity replenished its images of totality (either through its identification or through its difference from it). This is the problem with liminality or the place in-between: it might be the place of resistance, but it just as easily can be seen as the place of complicity par excellence. As de Certeau explains, this “non-place” is indispensable for any orientation but it cannot have a place in history because it is the principle that organizes history.54 As such, it is the object upon which the subject projects the values that constitute it, that is,

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produces it in time, without itself ever being in time. “It could be said,” de Certeau continues, “that it is myth transformed into a chronological postulate—at once erased from the narrative but everywhere presupposed in it, impossible to eliminate.” And he concludes: “A necessary relation to the other, to this mythic ‘zero,’ is still inscribed in the narrative content with all the transformations of genealogy, with all the modulations of dynastic or familial histories concerning politics, economy, or mentalities.”55 Under the logic of de Certeau’s argument, while initially it was Greece, its latest transformation places this postulate as the interstitiality of the postcolonial. Described by Bhabha as standing defiant against any hegemonic subscription to otherness, forever liminal and, as I have indicated, in danger of being seen as the ground of complicity par excellence (much in the same way that Greece has), this space must be interrogated. “We are to look up from this ground,” writes Stathis Gourgouris in his mapping of the nation as the space of this otherness, “not to what beckons the utopian (like so many secular prophets) but to what breaks into the space of the present time.”56 It is my contention that what breaks into the present time of the postcolonial is the ghost of Greece as other. Nowhere is the crossing of these two moments in the history of “the mythic zero” more evident than in one of colonial discourse analysis’s groundbreaking texts, Edward Said’s Orientalism. The contradiction between political intent and critical practice, claims for a new narrativity and the reality of the persistence of the old that this crossing produces, is reflected most clearly in his treatment of Greece. Greece for Said, contrary to his proclaimed Foucauldian methodology, is at and the origin of a seamless and unified European identity and thought that is essentially the same from antiquity to today, except that now it is more dense and complicated. His Auerbachian high humanism leads Said to forget his own argument that this sense of continuity is an eighteenth-century fabrication that was materially consolidated in the nineteenth century.57 Instead, he argues that the demarcation between Orient and West “already seems bold by the time of the Iliad.”58 “With Aeschylus’ The Persians and Euripides’ The Bacchae, the first and last extant Greek play,” he continues, “the two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the

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West…will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography.” “A line is drawn between two continents,” he concludes. “Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.”59 Clearly, the question of Greece’s function and location is central to Said’s argument; it is also what complicates it. He begins his definitions of orientalism by labeling as an orientalist anyone “who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist.”60 He next defines orientalism beyond academic boundaries, as a mentality traversing a great many centuries and functioning as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’,” and as such, capable of accommodating “Aeschylus...and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx.”61 And finally, he argues that it is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”62 He then comes to his famous conclusion that without examining orientalism, “one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”63 If one follows the temporal schema of his definitions, orientalist discourse began in the post-Enlightenment period and, paradoxically, also with the tragedies of Aeschylus. It “derives from secularizing elements in eighteenth-century European culture” but it must also be understood “not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology.”64 This double genealogy at the center of his historiographical project raises the question of the relationship between orientalism and colonialism that, for Greece, is particularly crucial. If post-Enlightenment Europe is cited as the origin of orientalism, then orientalism is an ideological aftermath of colonialism, and nineteenth-century Greece, under the “protection” of the European powers, is a colonized space.65 This is the genealogical strand in Said’s work that informs Stathis Gourgouris’s argument in Dream Nation that Greece is an example (the only one,

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he tells us) of the “colonization of the ideal.”66 If, on the other hand, European antiquity, and its increasing influence from the Middle Ages onward, is cited as the origin of orientalism, then orientalism seems to be an essential element of the modern European imagination. Under this scenario, Greece’s own appropriation by Europe is forgotten in the name of its powerless but ideologically seductive (for the Greeks) and, as we saw in the case of Lefebvre’s use of it, politically convenient (for the Europeans) institution as the origin of Western culture. After all, this “other within” not only provides Europe with an identity but also with difference (at the origin too). Said’s merging of the ambivalent space that is Greece with Europe, the power that has constructed it as “origin,” erases the present in the name of the epochal. Greece, the obstacle to his argument’s perfect fit, becomes the victim of its teleology’s fearful symmetry: it must be orientalism’s place of origin so that the critique of Western culture and its origin can be the end. Greece’s dual role, however, as part of “that hostile other world” that is the Orient and, in that it offers the “essential motifs of European imaginative cartography,” part of Europe, makes it what he identifies as the “otherwise silent and familiar space beyond familiar boundaries.”67 To understand this contradiction at the heart of Said’s work one has to turn to Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “re-occupation.” Through it, one could argue that his “contrapuntal” project in Orientalism, while helpful in contesting the grand, continuist narratives of modernity, is not a break from, but an example of, modernity’s basic temporal structure of historical self-definition through differentiation, identification, and projection. As Bhabha has argued, criticizing this internal contradiction in Said’s intention and method, “the terms in which Said’s Orientalism is unified—the intentionality and unidirectionality of colonial power—also unify the subject of colonial enunciation.”68 The example of Greece’s double placement at both the origin and the end of Western culture demonstrates that that subject is not unified at all. Understood not as a break but as a “re-occupation” of modernity’s disjunctive form, one can argue that Orientalism offers alternative temporalities in its

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content: it redefines the site of the enunciation of the “modern” and traces the colonial character of its origin. At the same time, one can also argue that it is affected by the European discourse on modernity in the function which that content is forced to perform: the function, that is, of inscribing the spatial logic of social differences across a common temporal frame (despite its intentions not to). Clearly, in order to avoid the temporal homogenizing of social differences, Orientalism and, in that it is one of its founding texts, the postcolonial translation of modernity, need to “reoccupy” the function that their content is forced to perform. To do so, such work needs to examine its own historiographical operation and situate its “originary nonplace.” In other words, it needs to analyze the dialectical movement between itself and the critical discourse on modernity so that it can free itself from the baggage of aesthetic-centered—or “modernist” in Lefebvre’s sense—interpretations of the present. Only then can we enter the “new time” promised by the postcolonial translation of modernity. The time, that is, in which we know “what it means to live, to be, in other places and different spaces, both human and historical.”69 A New Time of Criticism?

Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous manifestations of a single mind or a collective mentality …one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions....they suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time, cut it off from its empirical origin and original motivations, cleanse it of its imaginary complicities. --Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

The term “new time” came into use when the Renaissance’s replacement of the authority of the Church by that of the ancients came under attack—roughly from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. It was used in a neutral chronological sense at first to signify that the new times were new in contrast to the Middle

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Ages. Theorists of modernity’s semantic prehistory call this the third phase of the development of the historical meaning of the present.70 There was no specification of the criterion of newness: the term was not a category of historical periodization in any substantive sense. Rather, it stood for the absence of one. In this sense, it was similar to modernus (meaning “of today”), which came into use in the fifth century AD to signify not the cyclical opposition of old and new, characteristic of pagan antiquity, but an irreversible break from the past. The kind of history-writing that this understanding of the new time of the present produced has been characterized by Reinhart Koselleck as “annalistic,” based on testimonial (eyewitness accounts, the author’s own life, etc).71 It was in Koselleck’s fourth phase of modernity’s prehistory, the Enlightenment, that a qualitative transformation in the temporal matrix of historical terms occurred and the modern was no longer positioned against either the ancient or the medieval, but tradition in general: it is here that the modern in the full sense of the term is said to begin. “Time,” writes Koselleck of this period of the term’s history, “is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place; it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through, time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right...[with no] associated subject or object.”72 In this abstract sense “the present” “refers only to time, characterizing it as new, without, however, providing any indication of the historical content of this time or even its nature as a period.”73 Modernity as a qualitatively different time has three main characteristics: exclusive valorization of the historical (as opposed to chronological) present over the past, openness towards an indeterminate future, and a tendential elimination of the historical present itself. Modernity, then, has no fixed referent, as Henri Meschonnic puts it, “it only has a subject, of which it is full.”74 It is the product of an act of historical self-definition through differentiation, identification, and projection that transcends the order of chronology in constructing the present. He continues: “each time, the subject projects the values that constitute it onto an object...the object varies when the subject changes.”75 The “fact,” for example, that today’s “Greeks” were only yesterday’s “barbarians,” and yesterday’s Greeks were the ideal of

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“Man” while today’s are “struggling to be modern,” indicates not the “state of civilization” or “progress” of the Greeks, or the barbarians, but the changing desires of the subject doing the description. Such a perspectivism produces the kind of history writing in which temporal (not chronological) sequence creates knowledge and “historical truths, by virtue of their temporalization, become superior truths.”76 This emptying of history of any “real” objects—and the central position that it gives to the subject (and its changing desires)—is one of the characteristics of post-Enlightenment theories of modernity which has come under fire from postcolonial theory in this, the latest, phase of modernity as a “new time.” Homi Bhabha best expresses this critique when he wonders whether the “synchronous constancy of reconstruction and reinvention of the subject,” characteristic of the critical discourse on modernity, “does not assume a cultural temporality that may…be ethnocentric in its construction of ‘cultural difference.’”77 Since the subject doing the projecting has historically been European—Bhabha tells us—and the object on which its values are projected has historically been the colonial subject, postEnlightenment definitions of modernity are inextricably bound with the politics of the particular set of spatial relations produced by colonial expansion. To avoid repeating the mistakes performed in these definitions, that is, forgetting the historically specific social forms and modes of expectation through which the past is renewed, Bhabha, following Gayatri Spivak, recommends that we rethink our present of time in history by “seizing the value-coding” at work in its structures and “specify[ing] the discursive and historical temporality” that is the outcome of this catachrestic agency.78 Only then can we “establish a sign of the present, of modernity, that is not the ‘now’ of transparent immediacy.”79 Modernity, as he puts it, is about “the historical construction of a specific position of historical enunciation,” that is, a specific “we” that “defines the prerogative of my present.”80 It involves “a continual questioning of the conditions of existence; making problematic its own discourse not simply as ‘ideas’ but as the position and status of the locus of social utterance.”81 This kind of interrogation of one’s conditions of existence produces a post-foundational history writing that repudiates essence and structure, affirms heterogeneity, and approaches

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identities as relational rather than essential. The task of the historian, in this instance, is not to recover what was suppressed by the epistemological structures of the West, but to “critically confront the effects of that silencing.”82 We can accomplish this, Gyan Prakash tells us, “by writing histories of irretrievable subject-positions, by sketching the traces of figures that come to us only as disfigurations not in order to restore ‘original’ figures but to find the limit of foundations in shadows that the disfigurations themselves outline.”83 My account of the Sphinx is such a history, as is my reading of Greece’s history as modernity’s origin. Readings like mine reflect postcolonial theory’s rewriting of the modern which itself reflects our changing conditions of existence. Migration, tourism, changes in communications technology and changes in the international division of labor have altered both the relationship and the experience of the West and what it designates as the non-West. Contemporary reality tells us that there is not a singular subject enunciating the modern, but multiple subjects redefining it and enunciating it differently. In other words, there is not a singular modernity under whose universal temporal scale we all live, but a proliferation of competing modernities bearing both the promise and the threat of new historicities. This recognition that there are multiple presents, however, is not new. Nor is the “archaeologist’s” (in Foucault’s sense) desire to be elsewhere. Postcolonial theory itself has mapped how it was the very logic that powered the idea of the non-contemporaneousness of geographically diverse but chronologically simultaneous times which developed out of the colonial experience and inflected the West’s definition of modernity as the empty and universal time of the qualitatively new. It has also shown how the new was consolidated in such disciplines as anthropology and philology—colonial discourses par excellence. Their thoroughly “modern” projects involved mapping “the natural history of man” in time, that is, establishing historical differences between different types of society within the present by relating them to a disciplineproduced ideal.84 Although not new, the recognition of multiple presents is the logic that powers an unhistoricized, ungeopolitically reflexive and utopian postmodernism from which postcolonial theorists must be

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careful to distinguish themselves. Its project is to delineate the ideal conditions for the production of admirably multicultural and hybrid subjectivities in a brave new world. The future is pure “hybridity,” in this scenario, and it is represented by non-western cultures; much in the same way that the past was “primitive” for anthropologists or “incomplete” or “ossified” for philologists, and it was represented, once again, by non-western cultures.85 One of the common denominators in all of these projects is an atemporal Western culture whose primary signifier is ancient Greece: it marks the present for them chronologically and historically, that is, both as a new and as a different time. Anthropology and philology used it to extrapolate their “now” and to produce from it a retrospective temporal distance between “then” and “now” (which “now” they confidently read as also the future in the present).86 Unhistoricized postmodernism uses it to extrapolate its “not yet” and to produce a prospective temporal distance between “not yet” and “now” (which “now” immediately it reads as the “then” within the present).87 Either as memory or as expectation, these two temporalizations of the “now” happen within the general temporal-historical structures of the West that these discourses helped generate and, in the case of postmodernism, unintentionally maintain. By West, here, I do not mean only a geographical location but the “global complex of economic, political and cultural institutions which represent, in a universal temporal schema, the locus of any modern society.”88 Bhabha hopes to produce a different genealogy for modernity than the one described above. He draws attention to the importance of colonialism in the historical constitution of its disjunctive form and argues that colonialism is displaced and repeated today across a series of new racial and ethnic forms. His critique has a dual purpose: to rethink the historiography of the modern by showing the limits of its narrative and to change the conditions through which narratives of the new are generated. Because of this focus on discursivity, Bhabha’s “revision of modernity” has been criticized for being complicitous with the very epistemologies that are the object of his criticism. Peter Osborne, for example, writes in The Politics of Time: “insofar as it is the name for both an existential and a social process, as well as a project of theoretical elaboration, ‘modernity’

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must be understood to embrace dimensions of temporalization beyond the purely enunciative present of the sign.”89 Osborne also takes issue with “Bhabha’s bid on behalf of the hegemony of the concept” of the postcolonial as the site of the modern. “There is not necessarily anything specifically ‘postcolonial’ about the reproduction of the more general structure [of displaced repetition],” he writes, “although the repetition of colonial differences is currently one of its most important, and hence most heavily contested sites.”90 For Osborne, the general structure that Bhabha identifies as particular to postcolonial modernity is the very structure that characterizes the post-Enlightenment production of modernity. He thus argues that Bhabha’s code of displaced repetition is too restrictive “given the plurality of forms of social difference (especially class and gender) making up the world they represent.”91 Other critics from within the field of postcolonial studies have criticized Bhabha, and other postcolonial critics, either for not being forthright or for being dismissive of their relation to contemporary capitalism. Arif Dirlik sees postcolonial criticism answering the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships within the capitalist world and accuses it of reintroducing an unexamined totality through the back door “by projecting globally what are but local experiences.”92 Bhabha, and postcolonial theory, have also been criticized for leaving unexamined the heterogeneity of colonial power, and for participating in the production of ameliorative metaphors for the problems of colonialism in the beyond and not in the here and now.93 As the above critiques of its current life make clear, to imagine a “new time”— after the Enlightenment divorced it from any fixed referent—is a very difficult task indeed. Any such prophecy always runs the risk of being implicated in the very vision of the future that it seeks to avoid: the future as transparent becoming that must establish itself in relation to an ever-expanding and temporally heterogeneous past. After Foucault’s epistemological mutation of history into archaeology we do not search for the conditions under which historical knowledge is possible anymore but, instead, ask the question of the possibility of a universally valid science of history. The “integral past” is proven to be an Idea in the Kantian sense by

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Foucault’s interrogation of the archive of the modern. It becomes the never-attained limit of an ever expanding and more complex effort to integrate that must be interrogated so that “its slow development” can be “cut off from its empirical origins and original motivations.”94 Bhabha has offered past projection and time-lag as the tools for this interrogation. They are the means through which he addresses his main objection to the critical discourse on modernity and its construction of the time of the present as an epistemological structure. For Bhabha, there is a distance between the “pedagogy of the symbols of progress” and the “sign of the present:” it is man-made. In its space one finds the unedited transcript of the modern which contains the stories of “what could have been,” had they not been crossed out.95 According to him, these stories are what give modernity its characteristics of contingency, indeterminacy, and transitoriness and not “the endless slippage of the signifier or the theoretical anarchy of aporia.”96 Both projection and time-lag are discursive categories, however; thus Bhabha cannot avert the risk of getting implicated in the vision of the future that he seeks to avoid, a future, that is, that brings about only a change in narrative and not a change in lived experience. Both are the characteristic symptoms of nostalgia, a historical illness which manifests itself as the modern condition and whose recommended cures have traditionally been either Nietzschean forgetfulness or Hegelian idealism. Nostalgia is a composite of the Greek nostos (return) and algos (sorrow). It was a word initially coined as a medical term in 1688, a “pedantic neologism...invested with the appropriate classical trappings.”97 The prevalence of the Homeric topos in the discourse of the West was probably crucial in the invention of this word. Since in Homer, however, “the return home” was coupled with desire, not sorrow, nostalgia is a relatively modern discourse, “the inevitable part of an Enlightenment world:” a world, that is, which defines its time through differentiation, identification and projection with a past or a place, which, by the fact that it is the product of the subject’s projection, exists as the fantasy of the real or the authentic for which the subject then longs.98 Renato Rosaldo, in his investigation of representational violence in modern nostalgia, has demonstrated how this seemingly innocent

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sentiment masks the cultural expression of dominance that he calls “imperialist nostalgia.” “Imperialist nostalgia,” he explains, “uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.”99 He argues that in Euro-American modernity imperialist nostalgia erases collective responsibility and replaces it and personal responsibility with powerful discursive practices through which the past is perceived or narrativized as another place or culture. As the nostalgic object, the past’s function, as with all nostalgic objects according to Slavoj Zizek, is “to conceal the antinomy between eye and gaze...by means of its power of fascination. In nostalgia,” Zizek concludes, “the gaze of the other is in a way domesticated, ‘gentrified’; instead of the gaze errupting like a traumatic, disharmonious blot, we have the illusion of ‘seeing ourselves seeing,’ of seeing the gaze itself.”100 In that it does not long for, nor not try to forget or to sublate a past, but aches for a future, Bhabha’s nostalgia is not imperialist but utopian: it longs for a present that is not yet present. As such, it is the sorrowful longing for a return to nowhere. The template of this nowhere in the discourse on modernity, Bhabha has claimed, is the colonial space.101 According to him, it is this nowhere that the “subalterns and ex-slaves” seize in order to reinscribe modernity’s time-lag and to transform the locus of thought and writing.102 And it is this nowhere (whose model is the colonial space) that he seems to be nostalgic for, treating it as if it is already past when contemporary realities—and his own argument of its displaced repetition in the postcolonial—show us that it is very much present. Other postcolonial critics have also noted its presence. Kwame A. Appiah—in “Is the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post-’ in “Postmodern?”—points to the pitfalls (in this instance a temporal one) of assuming that postcolonial means going beyond colonialism. “Many areas of contemporary African cultural life,” he writes, “are not in this way concerned with transcending —with going beyond— coloniality.”103 “A nostalgia for utopia,” then, to transpose Gourgouris’ argument beyond the domain of the Greek poet George Seferis to which it was critically addressed, “is quintessentially paradoxical.”104 Both past and future, Bhabha’s “inbetween,” his “location of culture,” is outside history, the history of

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the present and, in that it is “neither teleological nor...endless slippage,” neither fixed (nostalgia) nor always in motion (utopia), it holds the place of the historical sublime.105 This is a highly aporetic move, despite Bhabha’s differentiation of his “genealogy for postmodernity” from Eurocentric ones that posit it as “the ‘aporetic’ history of the Sublime” which he criticizes for “merely chang[ing] the narratives of our histories” and not our sense of what it means to be in other times and places.106 For this sense to change, the conditions of possibility that he envisions must be produced in the present and not in the retrospective past or projective future. The present, meanwhile, is not produced by projection alone. In any particular case, it is also a possible object of historical inquiry (an objective referent) which constrains the subject in turn, in an ongoing dialectic of the constitution of historical identities and knowledges.107 Showing the fruitfulness of the critical intersection of Marxism and postmodern theoretical articulations, Gayatri Spivak, herself accused of constituting the world in her own self-image, addresses the problem of complicity in discursive orientated theorizations of the present.108 She argues, in The Post-Colonial Critic, that postmodern practices, like the observation that we cannot help but narrate, do not so much claim that all narrativity is valueless or the same but recognize “the limits of narration.”109 Elsewhere she explains: “This impossible ‘no’ to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and the everyday here and now of ‘postcoloniality’ is a case of it.”110 Because, she insistently maintains, the narratives of the regulative political concepts through which the historical frame of the modern is being reclaimed by postcolonial contra-modernity were written in the social formations of Western Europe, “that does not make the claims less urgent” or less legitimate.111 In fact, for Spivak, the catachrestic nature of postcolonial agency shows the contingency of the West’s fictions of origin and the necessity for questioning—whose endlessness she calls “women’s work”—of the terms of those narratives.112 She repudiates capitalism as a foundational category but nevertheless grounds her critique within the structural categories of Marxism and feminism, arguing for the necessity of systematic critical

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perception, despite the charges of essentialism or complicity that it might bring. “If we dismiss general systemic critical perception as necessarily totalizing or centralizing,” she writes of post-Marxist thought, “we merely prove once again that the subject of Capital can inhabit its ostensible critique as well.”113 If the constitutive incompleteness of the present is to be acknowledged and read as a stage in the development of a broader process, she argues, using classic Marxist terms, the speculative projection of some kind of end or goal is required as the horizon of intelligibility for comprehending the pasts. For Bhabha, “transform[ing] our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical” is that goal and projection is the process which produces the conditions of possibility that allow one “to articulate and negotiate” the “culturally hybrid social identities” that help us reach it.114 Discursive orientated theorizations of modernity, like his, offer one means of negotiating this process: they facilitate the production of the possibility for the articulation of culturally hybrid identities. Since the production of modernity, however, encompasses material processes of socialization and “real” abstractions (which of course are coded but cannot be reduced to the temporal logic of the sign), they also need to be addressed. Only then can such interruptions to the West’s narrative of progress have a transformative effect on modes of identification and action and not remain a mere “time-lag” or “in-between” without historical force. Current postcolonial historization locates the place of these interruptions in “the history of modernity’s antique dreams” detectable only in the traces of the “writing out of the colonial and postcolonial moment.”115 An archetypal place of the “antique” in the post-Enlightenment world was Greece.116 With the problem of origins that Greece presents, however, and using the conceptual tools of postcolonialism’s own translation of modernity, we have to question whether we can maintain this topos and the overdetermined concept of “antique.”117 To maintain it is to continue reading Greece as the origin of the ontological present of modernity’s “antique dreams.” To question it is to acknowledge the “‘enunciative’ present” of the sign “Greece,” to see its peculiar position of being in the interstices of East and West, and to acknowledge the

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instability that it brings to historicity, including the one that allows postcolonial contra-modernity its beginning. I go to Greece to impose a closure on postcolonial theory’s critique of European modernity’s fictions of origin by claiming faithfulness to an original moment or an original intent. Rather, “re-occupying” the function that Greece has been made to perform helps me unveil the practices that maintain the fictions that have posited it as origin and show the destabilizing possibilities in exploring its alterity. In arguing Greece’s otherness I might be viewed as performing a worse “mistake” than the one Spivak describes as “the new orientalism” that fixes Eurocentric paradigms by building “a canon of ‘Third World Literature (in translation).”118 Mine would be the error of conflating the story of what was used as the prime signifier of European or Western identity with the stories of the others that it was used to constitute and, in so doing, obliterating those others yet again. Such a conflation would also be a grave mistake for the critic interested in tracing the constitution of the modern Greek national imaginary, Stathis Gourgouris has argued in Dream Nation, because it would “occlude the political matter in the situation...the ceaseless play of imperialist power in its [Greece’s] continuous (re)institution.”119 “Neohellenism itself has been built on a history of heterological shifts,” he continues, and he lists them: During the period of the Greek Enlightenment, which saw in Europe the guardian of its cultural continuity (the proliferation and modernization of Hellenism), and subsequently, during the early years after Independence, when the figure of the Ottoman was still deeply embedded in the national memory, Neohellenism’s Other was the Orient. But once Europe’s Philhellenism understood itself as a fantasy entirely foreign to present Greece and shifted to the pronouncements of Fallmerayer and Gobineau, Neohellenism turned to its own Orient (Byzantium) in order to satisfy its required significational link of identity to continuity, and its Other became Europe. The switch from Hellenism to Byzantinism, however, is merely the manifestation of the consistent necessity of Neohellenic culture to define itself as Other to all Others.120

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Gourgouris is among several modern Greek scholars who have traced the caprices of history that have led to what he sees as the “basically nationalist insularity” of Greece as Other.121 Artemis Leontis in Topographies of Hellenism has argued that one of them was the West’s penchant for the ancient and the exotic at the expense of the contemporary Greek world. Another was the Greek desire to bask in the sun of Europe. Gregory Jusdanis has suggested that its self-perceived otherness is the result of Greece’s belated modernity. Heralding a new age for modern Greek studies, these critics want to relocate the field out of “the epistemological ghetto of ethnic studies.” They want “to question the status of modern Greek as another curious example of ethnic studies and transform it into a theorized field able to participate in interdisciplinary discussions.”122 Unlike two hundred years ago, they argue, “we can no longer afford to ignore [Greece’s] present.”123 Merging Greek cultural localism and a transnational theoretical cosmopolitanism, their primary goal is to prove the value of Neohellenism or modern Greekness in “current re-evaluations of Hellenism in the academic logos.”124 They also want to show that “from the margins of Europe, [Greece] can activate the critical potential of culture to deterritorialize the integrative tendencies of criticism, deny its authority to represent others, and question its universalist strategies.”125 Finally, they want us to “come to terms—terms as yet unknown—with the imaginary element in history.”126 Their argument for radical deterritorialization of criticism’s universalist tendencies is located in the generalized discourse of displacement prevalent in Euro-American poststructuralist and postcolonialist criticism which, despite its commitment to disjunctive temporalities, is rooted in earlier assertions of progressive, singular development.127 Meanwhile, as cosmopolitan and familiar others, their work, as that of all of us who fit that category, can be appropriated to manage diversity in the context of globalization in a way very similar to the way Greece was used to manage the civilizing mission of the British Empire. This is a danger that can be averted, Gayatri Spivak tells us in “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studies,” only if the “new culture studies” “negotiate[s] between the national, the global, and the diasporic.”128

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As a Greek-Australian I cannot help but approach the question of Greece’s otherness from this perspective. For me the question of Greece’s capricious history must be formulated as the reality of Australia. What are the caprices of history that have made Australia regard both the Hellenism and multiculturalism of its Greeks as catachrestic, “wrested from [their] proper meaning” and present its own Hellenism and multiculturalism as original?129 Postcolonial theory is helpful in partially answering this question in that it tells me to locate the answer in modernity’s antique dreams which erase its colonial and postcolonial history. When one applies this to Australia, however, one finds that its modernity’s antique dreams are found in the writing-in of the colonial moment, its identification, that is, with England and its “Hellenism.” Greek-Australians can in no way fit into that—doubly displaced, neither “Hellenes” (English or Australian) nor Greeks (backward immigrants or neo-Hellenes) they are brushed off to the margins of comprehension in the game of culture, national and transnational, even as they are held up as its exemplars. Here the antique dreams of the Neohellenic national imaginary that sees itself as “other to all others” are the nightmares of the everyday life of Greek Australians. These dreams, while occluding the politics of Greece’s continuous reinstitution, highlight the politics of the transnational Greek’s constitution; that is why they need to be interpreted.

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Representing Representations

On April Fool’s Day 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the early English travelers to Greece, wrote the following letter to Alexander Pope from Adrianopole commenting on his newly published translation of Homer:1 Dear Mr P., I read over your Homer here with an infinite pleasure, and find several passages explained, that I did not before entirely comprehend the beauty of; many of the customs and much of the dress then in fashion, being yet retained, and I don’t wonder to find more remains here of an age so distant.2

Her solely literary knowledge of Greece buoyed by these living “archaeological” discoveries, she conflates fact and fiction and, moved not by the local peasants’ reality but by the realism of Theocritus’ descriptions, she delightedly declares to Pope: “truth, for once, furnishes all the ideas of pastoral.”3 Now, she explains, she “no longer look[s] upon Theocritus as a romantic writer” but as having “only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country.”4 As for Homer, she can confirm his mimetic veracity too, by proving his “exact geography.”5 Book in hand she goes to what she thought was Troy, looks at the surrounding mountains and tells her reader that “every epithet he gives to a mountain or a plain

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is just for it.”6 The irony of course is that what she thought was Troy was later to be proven a fancy by Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in the 1870s.7 The added irony is that, as she tells us this story of her experience in Troy, she likens herself to Don Quixote contemplating on mount Montesinos. Like Quixote and his “true” romances, she uses her purely fanciful corroboration of Homer to endorse the literary historical accuracy of his text and her reading of it. In the process, she gets her readers to identify with the peasants that she has described not as historical entities but as fictional characters like the ones found in the Iliad and the Idylls. With this remarkable writerly ruse, Montagu, in effect, erases the contemporary Greeks she saw from the eyes of her readers. For her, it seems that, despite her belief that “change of customs...happen[s] every twenty years in every country” and her commitment to truthfulness, Greece has not changed in two thousand years.8 She criticizes other travel narratives for being “full of Absurditys,” distinguishes her writing from the “fabulous and Romantic” narratives of her time, takes pride in her own “eye witness” account, yet still manages to obliterate the life out of those Greek peasants.9 “True” yet “Diverting,” the Embassy Letters vacillate between classicism, obvious in the vindication of Theocritus’ and Homer’s timeless veracity, and exoticism, evident in her exaltation among the peasants and the ruins of Greece.10 An exaltation that mirrors that of her being “among the Turks,” stories about whom she took great pleasure in debunking. Perhaps, this mirroring is why the Embassy Letters have been read as orientalist only.11 She does not distinguish her delight and “pleasure in seeing the valley where I imagin’d the famous duel of Menelaus and Paris had been fought,” as she writes in her letter to the Abbé Conti, from her pleasure in going to the Turkish baths where, as she writes in another of the April 1, 1717 letters, “’Tis no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these Places.”12 After Orientalism it is impossible to read accounts like Montagu’s without seeing them as part of the discourse that created the Orient as Europe’s mirror for identification. Her account of her trip to Greece, however, although typical of the orientalist venture, also contains the seeds of philhellenism—a parallel discourse to

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orientalism and all the rage later in the nineteenth century. Philhellenism draws upon orientalism to produce its discursive order and because of the perceived impossibility of this match—how can one love Greece and the orient at once—it is full of contradictions.13 Montagu’s work displays them clearly in her argument that the Greeks she encounters are exactly like the ancients and in her simultaneous portrayal of them as ignorant peasants who do not know what butter is nor what their antiquity represents since they sell their ancient statues and melt their ancient coins to make pots and pans.14 Her work also foregrounds these contradictions’ resolution in the category of the real—produced at the time of her writing of the Letters—and its reworking of truth from historical accuracy to mimetic simulation. The shift into the verisimilar became the theorizing principle of orientalism and philhellenism and enabled them to tell their “truths.” For, as Said tells us, veracity played no part in their ideological descriptions other than being the measure not of any “such real thing as the ‘Orient’” but of its representations.15 The case of the “first” Englishman’s “eyewitness” account of Greece, a certain “Mr Drelingston’s,” who was praised by later writers for voluntarily undertaking “this voyage for the mere gratification of classical taste and literary curiosity,” is a perfect example of the role of citationality as the measure of truth at work in orientalism and philhellenism.16 The figment of a Frenchman’s imagination, this 1675 book, translated in English as An Account of a Late Voyage to Athens, containing the Estate both Ancient and Modern of that Famous City, was a deliberate and best-selling fraud.17 Nevertheless, it enjoyed much legitimacy. Goethe used it for background material, despite other travelers’ attempts to discredit it (Jacob Spon and George Wheler, the most prestigious of the “real” early travelers to Greece were among those who tried).18 Veracity should play no part in the demythologizing of the discourse of orientalism either, according to Said’s program of critical practice.19 One should not go looking for the “real” Orient in one’s efforts to expose the workings of its orientalist constitution because it does not exist as anything but a representation. An analysis of the orientalist text, then, he writes, “places emphasis on the

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evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations....The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.”20 Viewed in this context, Montagu’s absent modern Greeks are indeed a product of the orientalist dream factory and my worry that she does not see their present reality is its concomitant nightmare—the ideological fantasy of “the real” Greece. Of course mine is an “interested” fantasy (aren’t they all?). Unlike the Philhellene’s, the Greek nationalist’s, or the current tourist’s, however, the places where the fantasy of the “real” Greece was born and lives, it is powered by the dislocated immigrant’s desire to find a way of being at home in a place (Australia initially and now the USA) where “real” Greeks are one of two stereotypes, ancient or ethnic. Although both terms give me access to some sort of identity, in that its characteristics are the product of those dominant nineteenthcentury discourses—Philhellenism and Orientalism—that identity is always “ahistorical” or “backward” in the eyes of the dominant culture (uni-or multicultural). There are countless examples in the history and everyday life of the Greeks in Australia; one, however, a personal one, illustrates my point. Always called on to translate any chanced-upon ancient Greek at school, the presumption being that as a Greek I could, my high cultural “Hellenic” status always deteriorated to the stereotype of the “wog” whenever my translating powers failed me.21 Part of every modern imagining of home, the desire for one’s “real” home takes on a different urgency when it is not part of an existential search for locatedness but the product of a necessary dislocation, usually economic or political. Under these circumstances, it becomes the theorizing principle of locatedness in a place that denies you belonging. It provides “wordliness” to one’s writing, according to Said.22 The desire for the “real” Greece then becomes the nostalgic desire for a home one knows one cannot have but still longs for. The temporal distance from the time of departure, and its subsequent refraction in the time of one’s phantasmatic Greek reality, makes homecoming impossible, but the desire even stronger. In this, the immigrant’s nostos differs from the Philhellene’s

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for whom the desire for the “real” Greece (one he constructs) brings about a “homecoming” in which he figures as the modern day Odysseus returning to Ithaca only to find crass suitors surrounding his Penelope and occupying his home. For that is how these travelers saw the modern Greeks. As John Galt, a contemporary, but no friend, of Byron’s, writes: “The Greeks of these times, as seen among the ruins of the ancient temples, are but as the vermin that inhabit the skeleton of a deceased hero.”23 As for the modern tourist, the sentiments are not that different: “Contemporary Corfu may be too crowded to live up to Durrell’s claim [that it offers you the discovery of yourself]….But by trying just a trifle harder than the rest of the pack, I have found the essence of Greece.”24 The writer of this travel piece, representative of countless others in popular magazines, describes this essence as “the paradox of modern Greece:” a sense of time standing still despite the conquerors, the tourists, and the modern Greeks. The immigrant’s desire for the “real” Greece is also different from that of the “Elladitis,” that is, the Greek’s who lives in Greece. For her this kind of ideological fantasizing functions as the means through which she can secure a place in the discourse of the national. In fact, as Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai, among others whose work has helped us rethink nations and nationalism have argued, it produces the discourse itself.25 Whether as Western/ Hellenic or, as in the case of the populists, Eastern/Byzantine, the desire for the “real” Greece is “a technology of idols.”26 It produces a national-cultural imaginary, however oneiretic. For the immigrant, this desire and its idols only produce the label of ethnic “backwardness” at a time when most of the world sees itself in transnational terms and “progressive” western democracies see themselves as multicultural. The majority culture, meanwhile, feels free to enjoy the “real” Greece of Philhellenism or orientalism, the very one that it decries in its immigrants as atavistic. Clearly, any study of the use of Greece in the history of the West’s imaginative identity formation, like my inquiry into Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Greeks,” must examine not only Greece’s role as fantasy but also its role as a determinant “reality” in this history. Only then can the negotiation of veracity be addressed, both in the fictions

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themselves and in accounts that tell us that they are fictions, that there are only fictions. Orientalism has been interpreted as just such an account. In his rather harsh critique, Aijaz Ahmad, while acknowledging Said’s political commitment, nevertheless condemns his aesthetic-centered interpretation of history. Ahmad argues that his emphasis on style, setting—literariness in general—has led Said to deploy a “self-divided procedure” in a critical program that purports its “worldliness.” That is, his Foucauldian methodology steers him in the direction of defining orientalist representations as non-mimetic truth-effects and his Auerbachian humanism towards the problematic of realism and mimesis.27 Because of this, for Ahmad, Said has generated as many theoretical difficulties and political confusions as he attempted to solve in Orientalism. These confusions have been frequently replicated and even simplified in what has come to be known as “colonial discourse analysis,” he concludes, as it often ends up performing precisely the kind of orientalist maneuvers that it seeks to expose.28 One of them is the one I illustrated above: the quick tendency to point to the fictional nature of all representations of the non-West and to presume that this deictic act “realizes” the fiction. It, of course, does, but not, I have argued, in the way one expects. Rather, it does so as a fantasy, in the way Lacan defines it, that is, as a staging of the desire (to realize) itself (which makes this deictic act orientalism once again).29 Another such maneuver is to forget that the assertion that representation is always already a misrepresentation is a familiar Romantic trope, produced in the very space whose obliterations one is so passionate about tracing.30Ahmad’s critique, although problematic at best, raises a central problem within criticism: the problem of representation, aesthetic and political. At the center of its elaboration are the old questions of art and truth and the role of the intellectual. These questions are prominent in Said’s writing. Merging Marxist and poststructuralist positions on issues such as objective reality and representational practices, he proposes a structure of cultural production based on relationships between locatable elements in the world. Writing is produced by someone as opposed to no one, he argues, and at a particular point in time as opposed to no time. “My

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position is that texts are worldly,” he writes in The World, the Text, and the Critic, “to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”31 As he shows in Orientalism, Western culture tends to erase all signs of this operation, so, for him, the best manner of recognizing the organizing principles or elements of a culture is to embrace displacement or, to use his terminology, exile. In his writing, exile is the term that makes the study of literature and culture “worldly,” that is, it links politics and art through the practice of criticism. “The more one is able to leave one’s home,” he writes in Orientalism, “the more easily one is able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”32 It is precisely this use of exile to construct a worldly, or cosmopolitan, set of linked affiliations that can destabilize nationalist identities that Ahmad criticizes in Said. For Ahmad (rather narrowly I might add, as my own immigrant experience has taught me and as I have indicated above in my critique of strictly nationalist readings of the desire for a home) exile is an experience forged in pain and truly understood only by those who have been forced to leave their home in fear of dying.33 Despite his own exile, in his work, Ahmad argues, Said still links exile to aesthetic, and not worldly, principles since he deploys it as a metaphor for the condition of the soul in general and does not specifically relate it to facts of material life. Ahmad personalizes his critiques of Said’s and other postcolonial theorists’ work for undermining the material conditions that lead to displacement and hence diverging from the socialist project that he endorses. Gayatri Spivak in her examination of intellectuals and representation in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” while defending ideology, chooses to move the discourse from the level of individual blame to a more structural examination of inequities in the division of labor in postmodernity. After examining how “the theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing cover for this subject of knowledge,” she argues that there is no pure space of post-representation that evades

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essentialism.34 Under these conditions, she has consistently told us throughout her work, one is obligated to make “ethical mistakes,” catachrestic gestures like invoking the “real,” for example, when one knows full well that it has been modernity’s primal dream, the fantasy (as either mimesis or refraction) through which it sought self-confirmation. This is no debunking in the name of “truth” or for the purpose of locating “truth-effects” (depending on which critical genealogy one affiliates themself with, the Marxist/humanist or the Nietzschean). Rather, it is a “seizing of the value coding” that constitutes the “real” Europe or Orient and, in so doing, specifying the discursive and historical conditions of its production—the in-between in which the “truth” of its history lies. It is the search for the “value coding” of the “real” of Greece that led me to Montagu and other travelers’ accounts, for they were instrumental in the production of its “reality.” Said has quite thoroughly documented the travel writer’s role as a “field worker” in the discourse of orientalism: he or she is the one whose “personal, sometimes garbled testimony” was converted “into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers” and used in the making of their careers.35 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury travel writers to Greece are no exception. Their accounts of their exaltation among its ruins fed into the discipline that called itself the “science of Antiquity” which, as Martin Bernal argues, became the model discipline for research in the human sciences.36 Its methods are still in use today: “clear-cut meritocratic networks of student-teacher relationships, Seminars or departments capable of manoeuvering to secure as large a portion of state funding as possible, and journals written in professional jargon designed to maintain barriers between the practitioners of the discipline and the lay public.”37 As with Classics, the reasons for this kind of practice are political: literary expertise is organized around a principle of noninterference that encourages the separation of art and life. From the beginning in Germany, Bernal has documented the development and widespread promotion of the new Altertumwissenschaft. Like its equivalent Classics in England, he writes, it “was seen by its promoters as a ‘third way’ between reaction and revolution. In

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actuality, however, its effect was to shore up the status quo.”38 Antiquity in general, and Greece in particular, was seen by the practitioners of this “science” as a “way in which to integrate students and the people as a whole, whose lives they saw being fragmented by modern society.”39 In other words, “the Greeks” were the organizing principle through which the fragmented narratives of the nation or the culture were unified. By the nineteenth century, when Classics was consolidated both in the English university and secondary school curriculum, Greece was seen as a secular example of “perfection” and—in that it improved from its earlier “pre-Hellenic” state—also of progress. As such, it functioned as the perfect mirror of English “reality.” To appeal to Greece in Victorian England, as Brian Turner writes, was to “appropriate and domesticate a culture of the past with which there had been, particularly in Britain, a discontinuous relationship. And that very discontinuity may have been part of the attraction for the nineteenth-century writers who regarded much of their own experience as discontinuous with the recent past.”40 Thus Matthew Arnold—breaking with descriptive representation and attacking British political institutions—sees the “Hellenes” (men of letters educated in Classics) as the “true apostles” of equality (and not the Hyde Park rioters against whom he wrote Culture and Anarchy). They scrape away economic, sectional, and class identity (social identity itself) and leave behind only “the best knowledge and thought of the time” and, as a result, only the “disinterested” and thus “best self.”41 Showing his own class interests, he wants the state to represent this “self ” and not one dependent on a God above or a social world below.42 The idea of Greece offered him the means with which to locate his definition of culture as value and depict it as representing the social.43 Similarly, J. S. Mill used Greece, in Considerations On Representative Government, to model his program of reform for English political institutions and then to argue England’s superiority as a nation and hence its right to “civilize” “barbarians.”44 Like Arnold, Mill also posits that the “instructed minority,” “the elite of the country” should make up the state.45 Its goal should be to represent value to the population by constructing its institutions so that they teach the population what it should want instead of passively mirroring what it does want.46

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The most important of these institutions for Mill was education, and Classics was its dominant subject.47 Classics was also the model for English (which later displaced it in the national curriculum), whose nation-building and colony-managing properties have been well-documented not only in accounts of the discipline’s rise but also explicitly stated in English Studies’ founding documents.48 The Newbolt Report, for example, the first government report on the teaching of English in England, reflects Arnold and Mill’s work quite clearly. It states that English’s purpose is to unite classes, beget the right kind of national pride, and transmit and cultivate it both home and abroad. To this end, the only subjects that it mandated for the civil service exam were English and Classics.49 The rise and the institution of the study of Classics, as Bernal has shown, was a crucial moment in the discourse of the West. Its own widespread effects on European cultural and political institutions indicates that its significance goes beyond Bernal’s concern with the demise of the Ancient Model of Classical Civilization. Its maieutic function for English studies demands that histories of English go beyond concerns with its complicity in nation-building. The discipline’s role in the history of colonialism shows, instead, that the study of Classics touches on the general structural make-up of western societies. Travel narratives provided a substantial part of the content for these structures. As Caren Kaplan argues, travel writing chronicles the literary styles of various phases of imperialism.50 The one that chronicles the production of Greece is realism. Mid-eighteenthcentury accounts, with their negotiation of fact and fiction, helped define not only what by the nineteenth century came to be known as Greece but also the very category of the real itself. Montagu’s text, caught in what theorists of the novel have mapped as a mideighteenth century shift in referentiality, is a prime example of this definition process. Uprooting Greece from the historical context of earlier travel narratives, it places it in the category of fiction that has realism as its formal sign. In so doing, it helps construct the conditions of representability, the context, in which notions of the past can gain the status of the real and become the measure of history. Her text’s example demonstrates that any study of Greece’s use in the West’s imaginative, historical and political self-fashioning

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must examine not only Greece’s role as fantasy but also its role as a determinant “reality” in this history. It demands that the negotiation of veracity be addressed both in the fictions themselves and in accounts like Said’s that tell us that they are fictions, that there are only fictions. Founding the “Real” Greeks

The early eighteenth century—the time of Montagu’s journey and her writing of the journal on which the later compilation of the Embassy Letters is based—showed a steadily increasing interest in Greece, hostility to the Ottomans being a central factor in the sentimentalization of Greek-speaking peoples of the time. Terence Spencer, a Philhellene himself, interested in arguing the continuity of his passion sees this early-eighteenth century work as the result of the long “pre-Philhellenist” history of textual representations of Greece, mostly in poems, romances, “histories” and fake “real” voyages. It demonstrates, he writes, that “the people of Greece as much as the monuments...had survived through Antiquity.”51 Along with the literary, one also finds references to Greece in the marginalia of trade accounts like the Levant Company’s and in histories of the Ottoman Empire.52 The latter’s portrayal of Greece has the usual lamentations about its past glory, the degeneration of the Greeks, and the yoke of the Turks, and some interesting theories about what happened to the Greeks. Of these histories, the most prestigious was Richard Knolles’s Generall History of the Turkes, originally published in 1603 and regularly reprinted into the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson praised it as possessing “all the excellencies that narration can admit.”53 There is also Aaron Hill’s A Full Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire published in 1709 and going into a second edition that same year. In it, the usual line about the degeneracy of the Greeks in comparison to their ancient ancestors is turned into an interesting argument for their Turkishness and hence the Europeanness of the Turks. He writes: “most of the Modern Turks, especially those of Europe, are descended from the Greeks, the old Inhabitants of that Subverted Country.”54 Interestingly, echoing later Greek demoticist desires to found Hellas from Byzantium, he writes

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of his emotional distress at finding a descendant of the Byzantine emperors employed as a stablehand:55 I was never more Sensibly Afflicted at the Misfortunes of another, than when I saw at Constantinople, in the House of Mr. Williams, an English Merchant, now at Aleppo, one Constantine Paleologus, at that time a Groom of his Stables. This Man demonstrated by undeniable Proofs, that he was Lineally Descended from the Emperors of Greece; but was most sordidly Illiterate, and Inexpressibly Ignorant in anything beyond the dressing of his Horses; yet he had a peculiar Majesty in his Person...an Awful Gravity adorn’d his Countenance, and his silent Postures had somewhat Naturally Noble.56

This kind of response usually was reserved for the lamentation of the degeneration of the Greeks from their ancient ancestors. Not that Hill does not offer plenty of that also, but his location of the nobility of the modern Greeks on a Byzantine ideal is highly unusual for this time interested only in ancients. His example serves as a counter-example to Montagu’s who ridiculed his descriptions (and Knolles’s tediousness). I am in no humour to copy what has been writ so often over. To what purpose should I tell you that Constantinople was the ancient Byzantium? that ‘tis at present the conquest of a race of people supposed Scythians? that there are five or six thousand mosques in it? that Sancta Sophia was founded by Justinian? &c. I’ll assure you ‘tis not [for] want of learning that I forbear writing all these bright things. I could also, with little trouble, turn over Knolles and Sir Paul Rycaut, to give you a list of Turkish emperors; but I will not tell you what you may find in every author that has writ of this country. I am more inclined, out of a true female spirit of contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors; as, for example, in the admirable Mr Hill, who so gravely asserts, that he saw in Sancta Sophia a sweating pillar, very balsamic for disordered heads.57

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Distinguishing her own work from these “histories,” she also mocks other travelers’ accounts: “Tis a particular pleasure to me here, to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far removed from truth, and so full of absurdities. I am very well diverted with them.”58 She is not interested, she tells Pope, in making her presence in “Antique lands” “a subject affording many poetical Turns.”59 “I dare say,” she begins her April 1, 1717 letter to him, “You expect at least something new in this Letter after I have gone a Journey not undertaken by any Christian for some 100 years.”60 And, in a highly ironic manner, she recounts an episode where she nearly fell overboard as she was crossing the Hebrus: “if I had much regard for the Glorys that one’s Name enjoys after Death I should certainly be sorry having miss’d the romantic conclusion of swimming down the same River in which the Musical Head of Orpheus repeated verses so many ages since.61 “We travelers,” she writes to her sister, “are in very hard circumstances:” If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull, and we have observed nothing. If we tell any thing new, we are laughted at as fabulous and romantic....But people judge of travelers exactly with the same candour, good nature, and impartiality, they judge of their neighbours....I depend upon your knowing me enough to believe whatever I seriously assert as the truth.62

But she also writes in the same letter: “I am resolv’d to keep the Copys [of the previous letters she had sent but was afraid her sister never got] as testimonys of my Inclination to give you (to the utmost of my power) all the Diverting part of my travells while you are exempt from all the fatigues and inconveniencys.”63 “True” and “diverting,” the Embassy Letters are indeed a measure, “not of any such thing as the ‘Orient’” but of its representations.64 From her famous depiction of the Turkish baths, to her description of the “the fair Fatima”—a woman so replete with oriental splendor that Lady Mary worries that her sister (the recipient of her letter) will think that she has degenerated into “a downright storyteller” of the type that wrote the “Arabian Tales”—to her description of a Turkish

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marriage ceremony, she certainly follows the orientalist mode.65 She even tells an almost risqué story of a Spanish woman, abducted by a Turkish admiral, whose fate “modesty” prohibited Montagu from recounting properly.66 The fact that she had the Turkish admiral behave like a perfect gentleman and that she praised the civility of the Turks does not stop her from following the tradition of the oriental tale. She tells her sister that The Arabian Nights, with which her own descriptions might be compared, “were written by an author of this country and (excepting the enchantments) are a real representation of the manners here.”67 And just in case her equation of Fatima’s “politeness and good breeding” with that of the English court is misunderstood, she also tells us that Fatima’s mother was Polish, hence her civilized manner and good conversation.68 These are representations of representations, down to the reference to Arabian Nights, that most cited of orientalist books.69 So, however, are her representations of the Greeks. Her point of reference, her “guide” in describing them is the literature of Theocritus and Homer whose accuracy she can “verify” through her eye-witness account. Meanwhile, she also uses Hill and Knolles, despite her derision and protestations at their veracity. She writes, for instance, of Chios, an island that the Preston’s log (the ship she was on) confirms that she merely sailed past without staying: “The Town is well built, the women famous for their Beauty, and shew their faces as in Christendom…Their Chains hang lightly on them.”70 This is a direct citation from Aaron Hill who describes Chios town’s neat buildings and handsome women.71 Similarly, she uses Rycaut to point out the islanders’ preference for Turkish rule over Genoan.72 Reliance on eye-witness positionality for the construction of “truthfulness” and authentication of that “truth” through citationality, characteristic of orientalist practice, combine in Montagu’s text to represent (that is, replace, in Said’s terms) contemporary Greek reality.73 As the letter to Pope shows, Greeks are timeless, having retained “many of the customs and much of the dress” in fashion during Theocritus’ time.74 Yet, they are also merchants or robbers who, unlike her, have no idea of “Greek” high culture. “You are not to suppose,” she writes to Abbé Conti, that even the “antiquarys (who are all Greeks) know anything. Their

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Trade is only to sell….They get the best price they can for any of ‘em [Greek medals], without knowing those that are valuable from those that are not.”75 Then, in another letter to him, “forget[ing] myself,” as she says, “in historical touches,” she gives an account of her sea journey across the Aegean, past Tenedos, to Cape Sounion, the Morea, by the Peloponese, where she writes “instead of demy Gods and heros, I was credibly inform’d ‘tis now over run by Robbers.”76 Either as ancients, proof that Theocritus and Homer are useful guides to what is “really there,” or as merchants and robbers, the modern Greeks in Montagu’s text are erased. “Timeless,” they validate English classicism and gentlemanly studies (both instrumental in the discourse of Philhellenism). “Historical,” that is, Ottoman subjects, they are portrayed, in true orientalist fashion, as backward and ignorant, validating thus English civilization and its progress. In their ambivalent representation of Greece as timeless and exotic, but not contemporary, Montagu’s Embassy Letters anticipate the later, mid-eighteenth-century, more academic and less venturesome “discovery” of it that scholars designate as the discursive origin of Philhellenism.77 The number of publications produced at this time made the first part of the century’s pale in comparison.78 There was clearly a market for Greece, for the exotic land itself but particularly for Hellas.79 Translations of ancient Greek texts into English were at an all time high.80 Meanwhile, travelers, such as Charles Perry, Richard Pockocke, Charles Drummond, Richard Chandler, and Robert Wood, wrote multi-folio treatises on Greece and its antiquities trying to “verify” humanist perceptions. 81 As Robert Eisner explains, commenting on eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, since many classical places existed only as texts, “it was only by reading Pausanias or Aeschylus in situ that one might feel historically situated, or only by annotating the tour once back home that one might feel thoroughly experienced in the famous places where civilization had arisen and fallen.”82 Hence, Robert Wood, in his A Comparative View of the antient and present state of the Troade, declares as the principal object in his travels “read[ing] the Iliad and Odyssey in the countries where Achilles fought, where Ulysses travelled, and where Homer sung.”83 Like Montagu, he was impressed

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by the “exact geography” of Homer and demanded its careful study by those who wished to understand him. Later, Byron, who detested “antiquarian twaddle,” responding to the controversy over the “Troy problem,” nevertheless writes: “We do care about ‘the authenticity of the tale of Troy.’ I have stood upon that plain daily, for more than a month in 1810; and if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant impugned its veracity....I still venerate the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise it would have given me no delight.”84 “Grecian Taste,” especially under the patronage of the Society of the Dilettanti, was all the rage at this time.85 Originally a social club for rich young men, it quickly became the major importer of statues for the nobility.86 It expected its operatives to remark on “every Circumstance which can contribute towards giving the best Idea of the ancient and present State of those Places.” It emphasized in its instructions to the people it funded (Chandler in this instance) that they were not to be mere antiquaries but to “Report to Us, for the Information of the Society, whatever can fall within the Notice of curious and observing Travelers.” 87 In other words, they were told to be truthful, but also diverting. Chandler obliged, offering in his Travels in Greece what he claims as empirically tested reality and local truth through his endless correction of previous travelers’ and poets’ misapprehensions.88 James Stuart and Nicolas Revett, both architects, are the most famous of its operatives (they also traveled with Chandler as part of the expedition that published The Ionian Antiquities). Sent by the Society (in 1751) to investigate systematically, measure and produce drawings of the antiquities, they went to Greece with the declared intention of improving the taste of their fellow-countrymen, all through the portrayal of lifeless things.89 “We have resolved,” they say in their proposal to the Society, to make a journey to Athens and to publish at our return, such Remains of that famous city as we may be permitted to copy…not doubting but a work of this of this kind, will meet with the approbation of all those Gentlemen who are lovers of

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the Arts; and assuring ourselves, that those Artists who aim at perfection, must be more pleased, and better instructed, the nearer they can approach the Fountain-Head of their Art. All the different Subjects we shall treat of, will be illustrated, with such explanations and descriptions as may serve to render the Prints intelligible; and this will be chiefly done, by pointing out the relation they may have to the doctrine of Vitruvius, or to the accounts of them which Strabo, Pausanias or other ancient writers have left us.90

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Part of their goal of intelligibility was also the introduction into their sketches and descriptions of some splashes of “local color” or contemporary life, including members of their own party variously equipped with tape-measures and sketching materials. This life, however, was rendered lifeless. In high orientalist fashion, it was measured as a monument, an object. They discuss the countenance, the proportions, the elegance of form of the Athenians as if they were discussing the form of statues. The appreciation of Greece by these mid-eighteenth century travelers, philologists, and artists is decidedly different to the earlier one of Greeks as picturesque (Hill, Knolles, Rycaut), but also different from the Roman-centered Augustan taste of their time. Most scholars working on eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel narratives to Greece link it with the later, Romantic Philhellenist, appreciation of Greece, seeing it as its precursor.91 Montagu’s text, however, allows one also to link it to her early eighteenth-century appreciation of Greece, in which Philhellenism and orientalism coincide. Like her, these writers also rely on eyewitness positionality for the construction of “truthfulness” and authenticate that “truth” through citationality. Her classic orientalist methods are reflected in their classic Philhellenist ones, demonstrating, as the parallelism in Montagu’s text demonstrates, that Philhellenism is an orientalism in the most profound sense. Both engage in the like activity of representing the other culture, which in effect means replacing it with the self-generated images of otherness (and identity, in the case of Greece and Philhellenism) that English culture needs to see itself in. Montagu’s account of her trip across the Aegean demonstrates this

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self-mirroring beautifully; so does her literary pseudonym of “Sapho” among her literary friends, Pope in particular, before and after the spoiling of their friendship.92 “’Tis impossible to imagine anything more agreable than this Journey would have been between 2 and 3, 000 years since,” she writes, “when, after drinking a dish of tea with Sapho, I might have gone the same evening to visit the temple of Homer in Chios…Alas! Art is extinct here. The wonders of Nature alone remain.”93 She is a “real” Greek, then, not those Greek merchants and robbers against whom she defines herself. Montagu’s claims to truthfulness and her invocation of the “real” also link the Embassy Letters to another mid-eighteenth century discourse, that of fiction (and the new category of the real) whose origins theorists of the novel locate in this period.94 The real was a highly charged term in the mid-eighteenth century, according to Catherine Gallagher, when “a massive reorientation of textual referentiality took place” and the unmapped and unarticulated “wild space” of fiction became the “preferred form of narrative” and the novel the preferred form of fiction.95 She argues that, before this point, texts that we now call fictional were classified according to their implied purposes, their forms, or their provenance, but there was no consensus that they all shared a common trait.96 She is supported in this argument by other recent histories of the novel which have also noticed this shift towards explicit fictionality in narrative. Unlike previous histories of the genre, they wonder not where the taste for realistic novelistic fiction came from but why fiction became its preferred form of narrative. Michael McKeon, for example, has traced it as the result of an underlying epistemological shift from truth-as-historical-accuracy to truth-as-mimetic-simulation.97 He argues that it was the widespread acceptance of verisimilitude as a form of truth, rather than a form of illusion or lying, which made fiction a category and simultaneously founded the novel as a genre. With the legitimation of the verisimilar (as opposed to the historical), Gallagher concludes, building on McKeon’s work, the new category of fiction renounced historical truth claims and replaced them with mimetic ones. Their “truth” rested not on any extra-textual references but on their lack of referentiality.98

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Contrary to Ian Watt’s argument that “formal realism” was a way of trying to disguise or hide fictionality, Gallagher suggests that “realism was the code of the fictional.”99 She reads the “wealth of circumstantial and physical detail” in novels, that referred to nothing and “nobody in particular,” as “a confirmation, rather than an obfuscation, of fiction.”100 For her, fictionality “simultaneously, if somewhat paradoxically, allowed both the author and the reader to ‘be acquisitive without impertinence.’ That the story was nobody’s made it entirely the author’s; that it was nobody’s also left it open to the reader’s sentimental appropriation,” that is, to his or her emotional identification and “ownership” of the novel.101Gallagher uses Hume’s concept of sympathy to make her point about the reader’s “affective pulsation” with fictional characters.102 In Hume, “sympathy,” she explains, “is not an emotion about someone else but is rather the process by which someone else’s emotion becomes our own” only by “losing its distinct quality of belonging to someone else.”103 Unlike “true” characters (like the ones in scandal, for example), fictional nobodies were “a species of utopian common property, potential objects of universal identification” that everyone could have a sentimental “interest” in without paying any of the penalties.104 This is the main point of Gallagher’s book, in which she examines the affective force of fiction. “Eighteenth-century readers identified with the characters in novels,” she concludes, “because of the characters’ fictiveness and not in spite of it.”105 “Readers had to be taught how to read fiction,” she continues, “and as they learned this skill (it did not come naturally), new emotional dispositions were created” which formed the basis for the modern “self.”106 The primary one of these is one that is still in use today: it is the ability to invest and divest emotionally with characters we know are not “real.” The “real” in Montagu’s text is signified by the Greeks she encounters. As “the remains of an age so distant,” she tells us, they are “the truth that furnishes all ideas of pastoral.”107 In other words, these Greeks illustrate the realism of Theocritus’s descriptions and, in that hers correspond with his, the realism of her own. Without these peasants, Montagu’s text would be just another oriental tale that were abundant at the time, and which she criticizes as being “full

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of Absurditys.” History, meanwhile, in the form of Theocritus’ writing, would be the literary genre of the pastoral, and both would be “lies.” With these peasants, Theocritus’ pastoral becomes historical and, in that she verifies his realism, so does her own work.108 Her “real” Greeks thus could be seen as the “nobodies” of fiction by a 1763 readership (the year of publication of the pirated edition of the Letters), with a rising interest in Greece (this is the designated origin of Phillhellenism), already schooled by the mideighteenth century shift in referentiality in reading realist fictions.109 As fictional nobodies—“a utopian common property,” not “somebodies,” Greece became a state much later in 1832—Greeks could be identified with and “sympathized,” that is, their “reality” could be experienced as the reader’s own.110 It is no surprise, then, that the Embassy Letters, were read by every Philhellene who went to Greece and found and founded (if we remember the autoscopic practice of orientalism/Philhellenism) England. In their uprooting of Greece from the “history” context of earlier travel narratives and their claims of “truthfulness” and invocation of “realism,” they provided the conditions of representability, the context, in which a notion of the past could gain the status of the “real” and, as we know from the use of Greece in the Eurocentric narrative, from then on become the measure of all history. Realizing the “Real”

Montagu’s Greeks are a realist fiction, as are Byron’s—the English traveler as whose precursor she is consistently framed.111 This is not simply to make the general argument that any traveler’s account on Greece is the author’s fiction. Rather, it is to point out that the conditions which made Montagu’s Greeks “real”—their embeddedness in the discourse of fiction and its negotiation of authorship, readership, and “reality”—were the preconditions necessary for Byron’s literalist attempt to “realize” them, that is, to make them referential. A sympathetic reader, in the Humean sense, Byron incorporated the internal state of the Greeks, their otherness ‘intimately present’ in him hence lost to themselves.112 This is how he ended up as one of the very Greeks he tried to realize: dead and retrospectively con-

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structed as a classic in the Neohellenic imaginary. Byron’s account of Greece demonstrates that Philhellenism is essentially anti-Hellenic, for, even though he was interested in modern Greece, his negative reaction to the modern Greeks betrays his uneasiness with their reality, not the one he internalized as theirs. “Instead of considering what they have been,” he writes in Notes to Childe Harolde, “and speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are.”113 In a May 3, 1810 letter he tells us: “plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices [but] without their courage.”114 Inevitably, as the exclusivity of the “us” in the following paragraph from Notes to Childe Harolde again illustrates, he writes himself in the discourse of Hellenism as its protagonist and the Greeks out as its ruins. Ancient History and modern politics instruct us [my emphasis] that something more than physical perfection is necessary to preserve a state in vigour and independence; and the Greeks, in particular, are a melancholy example of the near connection between moral degradation and national decay.115

In this he does not differ from John Galt, his future biographer, whose book on Greece he criticized as “ye boke of a cock-brained man.”116 Galt writes in his 1813 Letters from the Levant: The sentiment, indeed, with which I feel myself most constantly affected, since I came within sight of Greece, and particularly since I landed, has a strong resemblance to that which I experienced in walking over a country churchyard. Everything reminds me of the departed. The works of the living serve only to inform us of the virtues and excellence of the dead.117

And later on:

In the wilds of America, if travelers discover symptoms of change, they are those of improvement; and if society be found there more savage that in any part of Europe, it is still but in a stage which the most refined people has passed through. The

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reverse is the case with [the Morea]. Ruins everywhere appear as the monuments of a prosperity and a refinement now no more, and society has mournfully realized the fable of Sisyphus.118

And of the Greeks he writes: “they are invidious, to a degree, which even their degraded and oppressed condition is scarcely sufficient to account for.”119 Byron’s view of the nature of the Greeks and their nation is in sharp contrast to that circulated by writers and scholars of Greek descent at this time. His interest, like theirs, is national, but English, not Greek, making his (and that of all Philhellenes) a nationalism by proxy, entwined around the nationalism of home, in his instance England, even as he is fighting for his imaginary homeland.120 Displaying an attitude towards the Greeks he surveys characteristic of a colonizer rather than a liberator, he writes: The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! But they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may be Greece hereafter.121

And again:

They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels: they are to be grateful to the artist who engraves their ruins, and to the antiquary who carries them away; to the traveler whose janissary flogs them, and to the scribbler whose journal abuses them!122

Byron may have been furious, after witnessing it firsthand, at the despoliation of the Parthenon by the agents of Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, portraying Elgin in his notes and cantos one and two of Childe Harolde as a symbol of brutalizing imperial interests achieved in the name of high ideals, but, as the passages

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above show, he exemplifies that imperial power, albeit ambivalently since he also wants to model the struggle of the Greeks. It is this ambivalence, evident in the contradiction between his classicism and romanticism, in Lefebvre’s terms, that is, between his belief in the recognizability and repeatability of the idea of Greece (classicism) and his desire to maintain it as a possibility and nothing more (romanticism), that betrays this most illustrious Philhellene as anti-Hellenic. Unlike fellow travelers, such as John Cam Hobhouse, who delighted in antiquarianism, in topography, in reading the classical texts and writings about them and mapping them on the landscape they were traveling, Byron was not interested in what he called “antiquarian twaddle.” In his memoirs of Byron, Edward John Trelawny, himself a traveling companion of Byron’s thirteen years later, records Byron recalling of himself and Hobhouse: Travelling in Greece, Hobhouse and I wrangled every day. His guide was Mitford’s fabulous History. He had a greed for legendary lore, topography, inscriptions; gabbled in lingua franca to the Ephori of the villages, goatherds, and our dragoman. He would potter with map and compass at the foot of Pindus, Parnes, and Parnassus, to ascertain the site of some ancient temple or city. I rode my mule up them. They had haunted my dreams from boyhood; the pines, eagles, vultures, owls, were descended from those Themistocles and Alexander had seen, and were not degenerated like the humans; the rocks and torrents the same. John Cam’s dogged perseverance in pursuit of his hobby is to be envied; I have no hobby and no perseverance. I gazed at the stars and ruminated; took no notes, asked no questions.123

He echoes this in the notes he took in Letters and Journals, denying his notes even as he is writing them: “I keep no journal, nor have I intention of scribbling my travels—I have done with authorship.”124 Contrary to Hobhouse, whom he portrays (through Trelawny) in this double portrait as a classical scholar, a connoisseur, a topographer, Byron presents himself as the wandering Romantic poet who takes no notes. He also does not want to be influenced by

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any others.’ His vision of Greece was informed by Rycaut, “Knolles, Cantemir, De Tott, Lady M. W. Montagu, Hawkins’s translation from Mignot’s History of the Turks, the Arabian Nights—all travels or histories, or books upon the East,” as well as Mitford’s influential History of Greece.125 Yet he publicly denied all of these readings, showing disdain for travelers’ narratives and histories, demanding that John Murray, his publisher, not send him travel books, his argument being that, when he was in Greece, he was “out of the way of hearing” so he wrote about it unfettered.126 Privately, meanwhile, he boasted about having read all of the above named authors, “before I was ten years old,” as he writes on the margins of Disraeli’s Essay on the Literary Character.127 His vision was also informed by his Scottish Romanticism and its interest in the revival of the “simple, the backward, and the remote” for whose innocence he was nostalgic.128 For him, unlike for Hobhouse, visiting the Pythian caves in Castri (ancient Delphi) was not about finding their exact location and upon doing so lamenting that they were now cowsheds.129 Rather, he appreciates the authenticity of the cowshed, relishing in the incongruity between then and now, using it as an opportunity to brood over transitory glories while at the same time claiming historical continuity through the work of his imagination. He writes in Canto I lines 634-637 of Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage: “Though here no more Apollo haunts his grot,/ And thou, the Muse’s seat, art now their grave,/ some gentle spirit [his?] still pervades the spot,/ Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the cave.” We see, thus, that unlike Hobhouse’s Philhellenism, typical of Philhellenism in general, that seeks and enjoys its intoxication amidst ruins and legends but has no interest in reviving them, Byron’s claim to historical continuity, his interest in modern Greece, makes his a “Philhellenism of a contemporary resurrection of ancient traces,” a Neohellenic Philhellenism.130 No wonder he was made into an honorary Greek. This kind of Philhellenism is really an orientalism. That Byron was an orientalist is undisputable: he calls himself one. “My researches,” he writes, “such as they were, in the East, were more diverted to the languages and inhabitants than to Antiquities.”131 In a letter to Hodgson he states this interest clearly: “In the Spring of

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1813 I shall leave England forever....I shall find employment in making myself a good Oriental scholar.”132 Yet he does nothing of the kind. As one sees in the description of his trip with Hobhouse, he was not interested in languages or the inhabitants. On the contrary, they were obstacles to his real interest, being in the landscape of the ancients experiencing it as a modern. “I am living in the Capuchin convent, Hymettus is before me, the Acropolis behind, the temple of Jove to my right, the Stadium in front, the town to the left, eh, Sir, there’s a situation, there’s your picturesque,” he writes to Hodgson on January 20th, 1811 from Athens.133 Byron’s is a picturesque not situated only in nature but also in culture: a contemporary (to him) Greek culture in which he sees the ancient and the modern and wants to live both.134 Here, in the apparent contradiction of the coincidence of Philhellenism and orientalism, a contradiction that Byron embodies, we see the unity that Henri Lefebvre sees as accompanying all differentiation. For him, as we saw in Chapter One, that unity in the discourse of modernity is represented by Greece. In Byron, that unity is Greece, not a literary representation, but “the real thing,” that is, the Greece and Greeks of his time, the ones he thinks of as rascals and hence as not worthy of sovereignty.135 These Greeks, goatherds, Ephori, villagers, guides, bishops (Byron tells us that he stole the classic Ancient and Modern Geography by Meletius of Ioannina (1661-1714) from one such bishop), populate Byron’s’ Greece, yet they don’t “belong” there.136 Degenerate remnants of Pericles’ ancient race, hardly useful in guiding one to their ruins, these Greeks were an obstacle to Byron’s claim to continuity, a continuity he saw himself as embodying not only through his body of work but also through his body, often dressing it in Greek costume.137 In his representation of it, this Greece of the “everyday” belongs neither to the discourse of classicism nor of romanticism, certainly not that of Philhellenism, nor even orientalism. This Greece is not recognizable, that is, it is not like the Greece of his reading, an idea, something to be achieved by the struggles of passion and imagination, and it is not a possibility; he does not want to make it present. This Greece’s traces, difficult to locate as they are because of their outside/in position, if presented, that is, rehistoricized as

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experience, can provide not only a different frame through which to consider Philhellenism but also a different genealogy for the discourse of modernity, one in which “tradition” incorporates the present, and not only abstractly, as a fiction. Reality’s Nightmare

Towards the end of The Last Man, her rather bleak futuristic novel about a Greek-born plague that destroys the world, Mary Shelley offers the following vision of a new beginning for modernity: We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which, having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country…To preserve these we had quitted England …trusting that, if a little colony could be preserved, that would suffice at some remoter period to restore the lost community of mankind. We would make our home of one of the Cyclades, and there in myrtle groves, amidst perpetual spring, fanned by the wholesome sea-breezes—we would live long years in beatific union.138

Typical of the colonialist imaginary, this dream of universality for the nation belongs to Lionel Verney, the self-titled last man and narrator of the novel. For him, and for the novel’s Eurocentric frame, Greece is the historical abstraction central to the nation’s future. Yet, as the origin of the plague, it is also the cause of that nation’s demise. The Last Man exemplifies this usage of Greece in the production of English civility as it also illustrates its limits. Although it is initially set in a future Republican England, not only directly in Volume II but also in its 1818 preface and even in Volume I’s thinly veiled autobiographical elements, the story is centered on Greece. It is a Greece situated in the interstices of East and West, the orient and

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Hellas, and ideologically constructed by colonialist Europe, even though, unlike the orient, it is not, strictly speaking, colonized. In typical orientalist fashion, the novel paints a picture of Greece as a “picturesque” place filled with a “noisy populace” dressed in “gaudy colors.”139 At the same time, in typical Philhellenic fashion, it also represents it as a place of “grand historic association” that “should be rescued from slavery and barbarism, and restored to a people illustrious for genius, civilization, and a spirit of liberty.”140 As nineteenth-century English subjects (despite their twenty-first century setting), and long term objects of Classics, the main characters in the novel, learn to fantasize early on about the Hellenic world, to desire to know it, to see it. Their fantasies are typical of Classicism and its interest in ancient traces. Typical of Philhellenism, and its interest in the resurrection of ancient traces, is their actual encounter with it.141 For how does one confront one’s social imaginary, one’s ideal? The Last Man represents it as an ambivalent experience. It is both devastating (the plague, after all, destroys the world) and regenerative when elevated to the realm of knowledge (made the subject of a novel like The Last Man) and sublimated as part of the ideological fantasies of Greece. This sublimation betrays the discursive coincidence of Philhellenism and orientalism, and shows that it is not only the result of history (both as we saw are characteristic ideological industries of the nineteenth century) but also of their coexistence in subsequent European scholarship.142 The novel’s criticism, itself part of the discourse of knowledge instituted with Classics (or philology, that most orientalist of inventions, according to Edward Said, which lies at the core of Hellenism and Philhellenism), demonstrates the long life of such self-serving fantasies. Most of the scant and primarily feminist criticism of the novel, concentrating on its autobiographical elements, reads The Last Man as a self-conscious attempt by Shelley to represent the erasure of history. Anne Mellor, for instance, sees The Last Man as “the first English example of what we might call apocalyptic or ‘end-of-theworld’ fiction,” in which Shelley “finally demonstrates that no ideology, including her own theory of the egalitarian bourgeois family, can survive the onslaught of death.”143 Citing the fact that the novel

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was written at a time of great personal crisis—three of her four children were dead, Percy Shelley was drowned in a shipwreck, and Byron had just died in Greece—Barbara Johnson argues that Mary Shelley documents not only the erasure of her personal history but also the history of Romanticism.144 Finally, Steven Goldsmith, in his argument that the novel marks the origin of a feminist discursive practice, claims that “The Last Man seems to represent...the erasure of identity and its displacement by difference in discourse.”145 All of these critics are curiously silent about Greece. When they do address it, they treat it as a metaphor for the “real” history in the novel—Shelley’s gender politics and her critique of Romanticism’s ideology and the idea of a universal discourse. They use it to provide coherence to their argument on history’s erasure. Nowhere do they discuss the fact that the material history erased is also, in fact primarily, Greece’s. The monstrous plague that descends upon the Greek revolution and stops it dead on its tracks is not read as a denial of the birth of Greece’s modernity but as a critique of “a certain male fantasy of Romantic universality.”146 Barbara Johnson broaches the fact that the novel is silent about “the political consequences of this suspension of the final confrontation between East and West,” but only to tell us cryptically that this silence exists because the “question of the relation or of the non-relation between East and West” is “badly posed” in the novel.147 How and why, and what are the consequences of this silence are questions that are left frustratingly unanswered by Johnson. Her primary aim is to argue that “in the last analysis [The Last Man is] the story of modern Western man torn between mourning and deconstruction.”148 Shelley’s ambivalent representation of Greece as both the origin of civilization and, as the origin of a universal plague, the cause of its destruction is the key to the critical silence on Greece. It is also the key to what I read The Last Man as being about, that is, a representation not of the erasure of history but of the impossibility of history’s erasure. Ironically, this attempt is not located in Shelley’s obvious and stereotypically philhellenic portrayal of Greece as a place of “grand historic association” that must be rescued from slavery. Nor is it located in her text’s utopian narrative content and its intimation that we can survive the end (otherwise how would we

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be reading the story?). Instead, one finds the impossibility of history’s erasure in the contradictory space occupied by modern Greece. Produced by the convergence of orientalism and philhellenism—her representation of Greece as a space emptied of people, “a darksome gulph,” and her desire to represent only dead Greeks—its traces are everywhere in the novel, setting its limits.149 As such, this space is what Michel de Certeau calls the original “nothing” which is indispensable for any orientation and which cannot have a place in history because it is the principle that organizes history.150 It is through this principle that Lionel Verney—who calls himself an “outcast” because of his “uncouth” and “savage” ways and his “war on civilization”—defines himself.151 The self-titled last man of the novel tells us that he “began to be human” only after he “studied the wisdom of the ancients...[and] the metaphysics of Plato.”152 Only then can he tell the reader at the beginning of his story: “I am a native of a sea-surrounded nook......the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding an effort.”153 The “rest of [the earth’s] orb” is represented by Greece in the novel; it is the fable that he is referring to here. As a “fable,” a non-place, Greece is transformed into a chronological postulate that is at once erased in the narrative but everywhere presupposed in it, impossible to eliminate. Verney thus begins his story with a lie because to forget plague-inflicting Greece is all that his efforts are about and that cost him dearly: his friends, his countrymen, the world. His insularist belief that the plague “drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt” does not bring him and his world much protection.154 England might be an island but, mirroring Constantinople, “hemmed in by its gulphs,” its inhabitants die “like the famished inhabitants of a besieged town.” 155 He also ends his story with a lie when he denies that his efforts to erase this memory of Greece as deadly have also brought forth history: the history of his narrative and, in that we are reading it, the history of our time. “At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion,” he writes, “but,” he continues denying the dominant content of his narrative, “I lingered

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fondly on my early years, and recorded with sacred zeal the virtues of my companions. They have been with me during the fulfillment of my task.”156 That task was, as he tells us after he realized he was the last man, to bid “farewell to matchless Rome [and] to civilized life,” select a “few books; the principal [being] Homer and Shakespeare,” and embark on a journey to Greece in order to place himself among “the spirits of the dead.”157 Whether he writes about it or not—and in the novel, despite his telling us otherwise, he does—the plague (and Greece) will be, and is, heard. Personified in Evadne, the first named carrier, who in turn personifies Greece, the plague lives on, despite Evadne’s death, Greece’s silencing, and even Verney’s death, not, in Goldsmith’s affirmative and somewhat utopian reading, as the site of a “feminist discursive practice” not also as “the nightmarish version of the desire to establish a universal discourse” (Johnson) but as the historical reality that is modern Greece in the text: the Greece, that is, which is part of the orient and is struggling to define and produce itself—following the course of the plague—out of Asia.158 This Greece of “gaudy colours,” unruly populace, and warlike chieftains was the fertile ground and transmitter of the plague and, as such, it, and not the Muslims already absent from Constantinople, is “the power that must be eradicated from Europe.”159 It is the “monument to antique barbarism” and not the Turks as the novel tells us.160 As Adrian, very Apollonian and hence “truly Greek,” reports upon returning to England from the Greek front, there is an indistinguishable savagery shared between Greek and Muslim.161 Thus, the “mighty struggle there going forward between civilization and barbarism” is not, as the Eurocentric historical frame of the novel would have it, between the Greeks and the Turks but between “truly civilized” men and barbarians, among whom one also finds the Greeks.162 The impossible presence of these later Greeks, so different from the classical ideal, demonstrates the tension in the novel between representing the erasure of history and its impossibility. This tension is evident in the uneasy coexistence between the violent Eurocentrism at the heart of the novel that reads Greece as its origin and justifies the Greek siege of Constantinople and the discourse of ethnocentrism which Shelley

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cannot escape and which has her openly criticizing the Greeks and in so doing undermining the language of hierarchy necessary to the European rationalization of domination. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the novel’s representation of Evadne as not only the unassimilable but also the destructive gendered outsider. Her textual space is occluded; not without consequences though. In her exclusion from authorship, her very accurate story of the plague read as the ravings of a lunatic by all, Evadne destroys the novel’s center from within.163 She is the carrier not only of the universal devastation of the plague, but also of a series of individual disasters that destroy all the relationships— personal and public—among the band of friends of which she was a member (albeit a peripheral one). Married once, and the cause of her husband’s ruin and eventual suicide, Evadne’s affair with Raymond brings down the sign of the male’s social power—the family and its ideal of monogamy—as it also brings down the entire English government. His private and public life ruined, Raymond goes to Greece in pursuit of personal glory only to end up dying conquering a plague-ridden and deserted city. His wife, Perdita, commits suicide, and Adrian, who had escaped his initial love of Evadne with only a brush with madness, dies of the plague on his way to Greece. Evadne, the “clever Greek girl,” the “monument of human passion and human misery,” leaves a trail of destruction wherever she goes.164 As Steven Goldsmith has argued, she “not only threatens the patriarchal order but in fact collapses it;” she “remains unpredictable and beyond patriarchal assimilation.”165 Evadne, however, also collapses the matriarchal order, for she is excluded from authorship not only from the text proper but also from the “distinctively female” space of the preface’s “Sibylline cave.”166 Like the Sibyl’s pages that, the preface of the novel tells us, are “scattered and unconnected,” so Evadne’s “wild and lost exclamations” are also either excluded or transformed.167 “I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form,” Shelley, who is also the narrator, tells us in the preface of her “edits.”168 “My only excuse for thus transforming them,” she explains, “is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition.”169 This exclusion allows the reader to see that what

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appears to be outside the text and its patriarchal order, the preface which has been celebrated by all feminist readings of the novel as the highly feminized and highly empowered place of the imagination, is already inside the highly disciplined, masculinist, and culturally mediated history of origins in the text. This history has England and the male as its center, despite its assertions otherwise. Although Shelley designates her source in a woman’s vision, “the Cumaean damsel,” she transcribes that vision “with the selected and matchless [male] companion of my toils.”170 This male companion is also instrumental in identifying the cave as the Sibyl’s and in gathering the leaves upon which the Sibyl’s “verses” were written using his understanding of their inscriptions as his measure.171 Shelley’s argument then, that “obscure and chaotic as they [the verses] are, they owe their present to me, their decipherer” is not exactly true.172 They are already mediated by her male companion’s knowledge and his power to name a new “Hellas.” To translate the prophetic leaves through this mediation necessarily excludes something of the Sibyl’s discourse. It puts her in an “English dress” which she can never fit, hence Shelley’s snips and tucks.173 Despite its portrayal of the gendered subject as the outsider, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man uses the discourse of ethnocentrism to incorporate that outsider into a masculinist and Eurocentric narrative of origins. Evadne’s recalcitrant and nationalist self makes it impossible for her to be included in this history. She might have an “English dress” and be a master of disguise—twice she has passed as a man, once anonymously submitting drawings for an architecture competition and once dressing as a foot-soldier—but the “too great energy of her passions” never allows her to pass as the sublimated English subject (the real/dead Greek of Classics) with whom readers can identify.174 Hence Verney, trained in “the wisdom of the ancients” and, as we see in the last pages of the novel through his journey to Greece Homer in hand, well on his way to joining them, does not recognize her when he encounters her in the battlefields of Greece.175 This is why he goes against the novel’s (and his own) initial Eurocentric claim on Evadne and sees the erstwhile “beloved Ionian” as a thing of darkness, “a form [that] seemed to rise from the earth,” “a Sultana of the East.”176 This is

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also why Mellor, Johnson, and Goldsmith—despite their efforts to rewrite masculinist fictions of origins through Shelley’s text—cannot identify (with) Evadne and, in their readings of The Last Man, either do not see her at all (Johnson), or see her as a duplicitous homewrecker (Mellor) or as a general metaphor of otherness with no specificity to her displacement (Goldsmith). Because of her inability to be translated in the novel’s and its criticism’s Eurocentric terms, Evadne will always remain an outsider—the Sybil had she been able to represent herself and not, as Goldsmith argues, “as she might have represented herself.”177 To speculate on how she might have, is, like Shelley, to ask questions of the Sibyl that are the measure of her own self-knowledge. For, as her textual history shows, the Sibyl always echoes another. Ovid has her say that she is “known by voice alone,” but that voice is never hers.178 In Virgil’s account we see the violence of her speech: “So did Apollo/ Shake reins upon her until she raved, and twist the goads/ Under her breast.”179 Apollo’s violence on her corresponds directly to her prophetic ability: the Sibyl predicts the future only under the whip and the words are never her own but those of the power that enters her as an alien presence (whether it is Apollo or, like Shelley, another woman wielding his power). The Sibyl and, by the novel’s metonymic register, Evadne and Greece cannot represent themselves; neither can they be represented, as both the text and the criticism of The Last Man show. Instead, their stories (along with those of Montagu’s and Byron’s Greeks) are replaced by the selfgenerated and projected images of otherness that its observers (travelers, philologists, novelists, critics) need to see themselves in. These have not only aesthetic repercussions, as Said has argued of Orientalist practices, but also, as the institutional history and hold of the methodology of Classics shows, political ones. This is the other meaning of Marx’s “vertreten” that Said passes by in his reading of the famous reference to nineteenth-century French peasantry in The 18th Brumaire: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”).180 Thus while Shelley’s text reflects Classics’ and earlier travel writing’s aesthetic representations of Greece, in incorporating Evadne’s (and the Sibyl’s) discourse as part of her narrative of origins, it also performs the political move of

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appropriating the terms of Evadne’s otherness: she replaces (puts in English dress in order to render her “intelligible” is her justification) those qualities of Evadne that are the very reason for her being denied the right and the ability to represent herself. The primary of those qualities is her teleology, literally, her end and the traces that it leaves behind (in the form of the Sibylline leaves which Shelley calls “my”). This is why the novel, we are told by Verney, is a “monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man” and why every character in the novel has an obsession with monuments.181 “All I ask of Greece,” says Raymond after he hears of the death warrant that Evadne has put on him, “is a grave. Let them raise a mound above my lifeless body, which may stand even when the dome of St Sophia has fallen.”182 By representing the end of history and the last man as English, Shelley represents the impossibility of this history’s end. For the history, and the end upon which this history is based, is that of the “illustrious” and dead Greeks whose “scenes” the Englishman Verney and his friends “renewed,” that is, replaced. “To our right,” Verney tells us of his first trip to Athens, “the Acropolis rose high, spectatress of a thousand changes, of ancient glory, Turkish slavery, and the restoration of dear-bought liberty; tombs and cenotaphs were strewed thick around, adorned by ever renewing vegetation; the mighty dead hovered over their monuments, and beheld in our enthusiasm and congregated numbers a renewal of the scenes in which they had been the actors.”183 Although it might appear that he is also hoping for such a renewal when, after resolving to write his “monument,” he dedicates it “TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD./SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL!/ BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN,” the fact that it is not clear which shadows he is addressing here makes his history irreplaceable.184 Are the shadows those of the dead Greeks, those of his world, or those of his future readers whose fate simply by touching his book and thinking about it (for that is how the plague is transmitted: by touch and by thought) is sealed? Replacing past, present, and future, The Last Man’s teleology enacts a historical totalization that the Greeks could never achieve. Had they been able to, the plague which personifies them in the

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novel would have been victorious and it would “really” have brought about the end. In other words, we would all be “real” Greeks, which, in the terms of the texts that I have been reading in this chapter, would make us either fictional nobodies or dead.

3

PRODUCING THE NATION’S NARRATIVE

History or Myth?

“Ζει ο βασιλιας Αλεξανδρος;”

--Gorgon

This chapter begins with a story, one that my grandmother used to tell me in order to explain my father’s name. Legend has it, she would say, that when Alexander the Great brought back from Asia the water that would make him immortal, his sister, thirsty and tired, accidentally drank it. Furious with her, he cursed and disowned her, banishing her from his kingdom. Dismayed at her act, the griefstricken sister implored the gods for assistance. They in their wisdom, balancing her act with its consequences, gave her the form of the Gorgon, half woman, half fish, a mermaid forever roaming the Aegean. When hapless sailors come her way, “Does King Alexander live?” she asks them. Those who know the myth of the Gorgon and the consequences of the “wrong” answer respond in the affirmative, assuring her that he lives and reigns, king of the world. She then rewards them with smooth sailing for the rest of their journey. Those who espouse modernity and ignore stories of her sighting as superstitious nonsense, surprised by her existence and eager to correct myth with history, reply in the negative: “He and the glory of Greece are long dead,” they say. Upon hearing this, the Gorgon, distraught at the consequences of her act, unleashes her fury at them and creates a tempest that drowns them.

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If the story of Oedipus institutes the Western “birth” of Greece and man, this version of the story of Alexander tells the story of the modern Greek man. It links a pre-Byzantine historical figure to a postOttoman Neohellenic sensibility and connects Greece’s Eastern heritage to its Western cultural “patrimony.”1 Such continuist gestures are rooted in the history of the modern Greek state, which at its origin comprised geographically separated areas with regionalist tendencies, particular local traditions, social contrasts, and distinctive idioms. The state tried to end this fragmentation in the characteristic nineteenthcentury way by establishing a highly centralized administration and the cultivation of a common language and culture through a national education policy that would solidify the Greek identity and subordinate the loyalty of the people to the state.2 The attempt to create a uniform history and national ideology, however, stumbled upon the conflicting ideological ideals of Byzantium, commonly held by the people, and the Classical ideals that were the western educated intellectuals’ focal point. This tension was settled with the formal incorporation of the Byzantine era into the continuum of the nation’s history, with the theory of Helleno-Christianism, according to which the two elements complemented each other. Intellectuals and institutions, like the university and public education, promoted this idea of uninterrupted continuity of the nation from Classical Greece, through Byzantium, to the modern period.3 The programmatic reinscription of the figure of Alexander the Great into Greek national-cultural ideology can be considered part of this national strategy.4 Part of popular culture in Byzantium and the Ottoman occupation, Alexander was also the subject of histories whose number increased from three in the sixteenth century to sixteen in the first fifty years of the nineteenth.5 The first years of Greek independence, however, saw a big rise in histories of Alexander, eight from the years 1832 to 1847, with 1833 being the year that the German historian Droysen wrote his history of Alexander, translated into Greek in 1859.6 In particular, 1844, 1845, 1846, and 1847 each saw the publication of a pamphlet on Alexander, since in 1841 the then president of the new state’s archaeological society, Iakovakis Neroulos, in a speech on the Acropolis, doubted the Greekness of the Macedonian king, and

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condemned the Roman empire and its successor Byzantium.7 Alexander’s story contained a diverse symbolic investment. Initially, he was seen as the link between ancient and modern Hellenism, the continuity through which the modern Greek state could claim what it saw as its unredeemed territories; later, he became the quintessential symbol of Macedonia, the most coveted territory still in Ottoman control.8 It was over this territory that the First Balkan War of 1912 was fought among Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and the Ottoman Empire. Understood as an archaic version of Neohellenic sensibility, the figure of Alexander was used to resist the subjugating projections of European Philhellenism, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, wanted Greeks to be either fictional nobodies or their dead ancestors. It also was the means through which to ward off the “danger” of Slavicization.9 The Alexander story has been used consistently in modern Greek history to incorporate the ancient ideal into a narrative of continuity with Greece’s modernity. My grandmother’s telling of the story served this aim, reinforcing not only a personal patrimony but also a national one. It is hardly accidental that my father was named Alexandros, even though none of his paternal male relatives had that name (that would have been the usual reason for him to receive it): we lived in Macedonia, after all, and my grandmother was born in 1912. Like that of Oedipus, the ideologically vexed and, in the Balkans, culturally and nationally contested story of Alexander also has a monstrous female figure encrypted in it. This Gorgon is not one of the three daughters of Phorcys and Ceto: specifically, she is not the Medusa, the only mortal one of the three and the one to whom the name is generally applied automatically. Hers is a modern myth, the product of the national imaginary. As with the Sphinx, however, the people who encounter the Gorgon also have to answer a question. Her question also guards claims to legitimacy: in her instance, not only to the family of man (anthropos) in general but, in particular, to the ideologically constructed modern Greek man. Authentic Greeks, gnesioi, faced with a death that in this case also betokens exclusion from the culture, side with myth and affirm the eternity of Alexander’s life and reign. Fakes, or nothoi, on the other hand, those who side with history by answering “no,” exclude themselves from

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the story of the nation, a story that involves both a willful active forgetting and ritual invocations of long-departed souls. In his famous essay on the use and abuse of history, in Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche calls active forgetting and ritual invocations of the dead an “illness.”10 Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1803 address to the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (of which he was the only foreign-born member) of Adamantios Korais (17481833). Arguably the most erudite figure in Neohellenic thought, a medical doctor by training (though he never practiced, choosing instead to devote himself to the national pedagogy and the independence of Greeks from the Ottomans), Korais fittingly diagnoses this national illness of modern Greeks in his attempt to muster support for their liberation’s cause. Of course, that he is also subject to it only confirms his authentic Greekness. He tells his French audience that Greeks tell themselves: “We are the descendants of Greeks, we must either try to become again worthy of this name, or we must not bear it (his italics).”11 Since the French, or any “men with a good upbringing,” considered themselves the descendants of the Greeks, they could not but have heard the “we” as addressed to them, even though it is reported as what the Greeks tell themselves.12 In this wonderfully economic scene Korais links Hellenism to Neohellenism by strategically reminding his audience of both their own and the Greeks’ past and future, attempting to ensure, in this way, their support for Greece, a Greece that his account was the first to represent both as modern and as the original, and constant, source of civilization. Demonstrating his location in the regenerative view of civilization characteristic of the discourse of his time, Korais tells his audience that contemporary Greek letters seem “to take the same route as their birth had taken, originating in Ionia and gradually spreading in the rest of Greece.”13 It had taken only twenty-five years for the Hydriots to change from being “the most ignorant portion of the Greeks” to one of the most prosperous, economically and culturally; similarly, the Chiotes with their “prudence” and unity have managed to become “the Frenchmen of the Levant.”14 Who is to tell, he asks, that Greeks, able to flourish intellectually under conditions of barbarism, would not help letters to “flourish once again in Europe,

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should Europe perchance once again fall into the barbarism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries?”15 Clearly, he seems to be saying here again, it is in the self-interest of the French, an investment in their future, to help the Greeks. The picture of civilization he paints here is quite an ideological coup: Korais is weaving a mémoire (the initial title of his address that was translated in English as report), a history, of a nation that does not yet exist. But it is also an anthropological observation, one characteristic of the Société’s metaphoric consolidation of language/nation /civilization as physiological bodies.16 The picture echoes the very opening paragraph of the “Report on the Present State of Civilization in Greece,” in which he not only diagnoses the particular state, both natural and cultural/national, of the Greeks but also offers a method of diagnosing civilization in general: If the state of a nation is to be fruitfully observed, it is mainly in the period when this nation degenerates from the virtues of its ancestors, as well as in the period when it is in the process of regeneration. The observer in both cases is placed at a vantage point which, by placing before him the succession of causes which lead to civilization being fostered or destroyed, affords him lessons useful for humanity.17

Commenting on this passage in which the interplay of civilization and barbarism is made possible by the translation of metaphors of natural history into the logic of the rhetoric of national culture, Stathis Gourgouris notes that the “Report” “is no less than the history of the nature of modern Greece.”18 What Korais posits as that “nature,” a nature that, as we saw above, he links to Greece’s history, ancient and modern, and which he sees as the source of civilization, present and future, subsequently became the foundation of the Neohellenic idiom and guided the production of Greek national culture which sees itself as exclusively linked to Greek “nature.”19 Korais tried to produce this nature/culture through a common language, katharevousa, cleansed of its non-Hellenic elements, closer to ancient Greek than modern, its linguistic continuity indicative of eternal Greekness.20 But, as

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Constantinos Tsoucalas argues, commenting on the struggle between tradition and modernity characteristic of Greek culture, “the indubitable linguistic continuity within a given geographic frame is insufficient to counterbalance an equally indubitable cultural disparity.”21 Thus, he continues, “race, blood, land, and climate,” in other words, the cornerstones of nineteenth-century definitions of the nation, were added to the “metaphysical and hypostatic totality” that modern Greek ideologists see as making up Greekness.22 For them, “Greek culture is untranslatable to the effect that non-Greeks can only catch a glimpse of the divine essence.”23 Korais had diagnosed this unshakeable belief in essential Greekness as “a national vanity, ridiculous in its motives but salutary in its effects.”24 “Together with the difference in religion and habits” and the bad treatment that the Greeks received at the hands of their conquerors, he saw it as central to Greece’s survival. These “resulted in the fact that a large part of the nation always looked upon itself as prisoners of war and never as slaves.”25 This “national vanity” fuels what Greeks see as their proverbial adaptability to alien situations, norms, and cultures they freely accept and exploit without losing an identity that is “by definition, irrational, transhistorical, and given.”26 While racist and essentialist, this understanding of identity was instrumental in the contestation, liberation, and establishment of the modern Greek state. Today, it is also the basis upon which citizenship in it is defined and granted. According to the Greek Citizenship Act (Law No. 3370/57) a Greek is someone born to Greek citizens or a foreign-born person with or without foreign citizenship who is ethnically Greek or has “Greek national consciousness.” The latter is defined as the connection with the Greek nation through common language, religion and traditions.27 In this sense, an individual may be considered and recognized as Greek in conscience (“thinking, beliefs”) even if he or she has no Greek origin through blood parentage. This chapter focuses on both of these moments, the historical and the contemporary, in its exploration of the production and the distribution of the state of mind that is Greekness.

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As with all wars, so with the end of the War of Independence (1821-1828) and the establishment of the modern Greek state in 1832, a huge scramble for power ensued, in this instance, between autochthonous Greeks (locally-born) and heterochthonous Greeks (foreign-born, in the sense of what comprised the territory of the Hellenic kingdom). The former were angry at what they saw as the hijacking of power by the latter, evident in their own exclusion from the national administrative machine, an exclusion that was almost synonymous with exclusion from Greek citizenship.28 The latter saw the war as a war of the Greek race against its oppressors. The autochthonous were interested not in the initial, larger, project of a war for the liberation of the race but in the fact that the war had happened on their territory. Their position was reconstructed after the fact as eccentric, a detour, veering off from the revolution’s central narrative in which all Greeks wholeheartedly supported the cause.29 In practical terms, however, it prevailed and, as a result, the revolution was mapped onto cities and villages, the state interrogating each one’s contribution to the struggle in order to determine its claim to Greek nationality and, by extension, its inhabitants’ entitlement to work in the civil service. Since only the heterochthonous needed to prove their participation, while that of the autochthonous was seen as a given, the revolution was appropriated by the latter, with the former fighting to reclaim a place in it.30 One could say, as many historians and political commentators did at the time, that the battle between the autochthons and the heterochthons was an example of the dihonia, discord, characteristic of the ancient Greek city-states.31 With this neat appeal to the mythic national character, one of the core ideological, political, and economic struggles in modern Greek history was legitimized as part of the nature of Greekness and its material causes were swept under Greek cultural continuity’s rug. King Alexander lives indeed! Of course, all things hidden tend to return to haunt one and, as this chapter shows, the question of aboriginality, ithageneia, and citizenship, Greekness in other words, is one of the most persistent ghosts of modern Greek history.

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The first article of the first Constitutional text of modern Greece, the “Epidauros Constitution” of 1822, classifies as Greeks “natives [autochthonous] who believe in Christ.” In this and in the other two revolutionary constitutions (1822-1827), there is no clear distinction between notions of “Greek citizen” and notions of “Greek Christian Orthodox.”32 These “natives who believe[d] in Christ” were not only Greeks but also Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, to name only the main groups. Moreover, since in the pre-1850s Balkans social mobility frequently implied acculturation into the ethnie associated with a particular niche in the social division of labor—to call someone Serb or Bulgarian, for example, usually meant “peasant”—class distinction meant ethnic distinction, with Greek being the term not only for the ethnic Greeks but also for the rich Serbs and Bulgarians.33 Adding to this melánge, the ancient Greek word ethnos (εθνος), plural ethnoi and ethnikoi, was used by early Christians and Byzantines for heathens, dwellers in the country districts, and foreigners generally.34 Thus, when in the National Assembly of 1844 discussion turned to Article 3 of the Constitution, which dealt with Greek citizenship, the Assembly was passionately divided on the distinction between autochthonous and heterochthonous Greeks, a distinction later (in the 1870s) reformulated as one between inside and outside Greeks or Elladites (those residing in Greece) and Ellines, those not. The latter were divided into outside brothers, whom the Greek state wanted to liberate and bring to its geographical fold as part of its Great Idea—first formulated in the 1844 Assembly as the dream of a nation that would include all the so-called unredeemed territories: Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, the Aegean islands, and the omphalos of Byzantium, Constantinople—and the homogeneis, the Greek diaspora at large.35 Not only in the pre-revolutionary phase, the time when all Greeks were homogeneis, since there was no Greek state, and the characteristic of Greekness was the multiplicity of its centers, but also in the post-revolutionary phase, when Greekness was centered in the tiny new kingdom, really in Athens, and the newly independent state was economically, politically, and geographically removed from the centers of Greek mercantile development, the homogeneis played a central role in that state’s economic and cultural

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foundation. Their post-1870s contribution, coincident with the first phase of Greek industrialization, was so generous—they were the rebuilders of Athens—that by 1880 the terms homogeneis and rich had become almost synonymous.36 There was some animosity towards the diaspora Greeks— certainly ambivalence—from those residing in Greece, even as “inside Greeks” and “outside Greeks” fed each other’s numbers through migration—autochthonous Greeks being the capital exports (to the various Greek diaspora centers) of the newly liberated state, their investment returning not only economic but also cultural capital to that state. Unlike the earlier struggle between the autochthons and heterochthons, however, which was about the establishment and control of a Greek center, this struggle was perceived at the time as being about the displacement of that center within its own territory. The autochthnonous in this instance could not win, since the means of both economic and cultural production were in the hands of the homogeneis, some former autochthons themselves who migrated to the various diaspora communities. The homogeneis funded and populated schools and the academy in general, by the 1880s allowing Greece, out of all the countries in Europe, to claim the highest percentage of its population in higher education. As Tsoucalas points out, despite an overwhelmingly agricultural economy and a largely illiterate population, there was a rapid expansion of the educational network in the provinces, in contrast to the slow development of the productive forces there.37 Because it could not repay in kind—the Greek merchant class which commanded the preponderance of capital did so from outside its borders—the Greek state repaid in ideology: the major commodity produced at this time was the image of national identity.38 One such repayment is found in Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’ (1815-1891) six-volume History of the Hellenic Nation, the definitive history of Greece, the one that set its discursive parameters, being the first to appear in Greece with such a title and with a periodization of Greek history still in use today.39 Born in Constantinople into a family originally from Βιτινα, he migrated back to Greece after the violence against Greeks that accompanied the start of the War of Independence.40 A victim of the heterochthon bias—he lost his job

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in the Ministry of Justice with the 1844 vote against heterochthons in the public service—Paparrigopoulos was a product of the cultural and political context of the 1840s.41 Witnessing first hand the rivalries between autochthonous and heterochthonous, inside and diasporic Greeks, he became increasingly concerned with “affirming the legitimacy of irredentism in a massive historiographical work that persistently proclaimed the unity and continuity of the ‘Greek nation.’”42 He was convinced that the Greeks needed to subscribe to a higher vision of national unity to override sectional interests and to promote union with the vast territories not yet liberated and incorporated into the nation-state. As an ideological historian, he strove to provide the script of that vision in his History not only by reading his contemporaries’ dihonia, or discord, as a sign of their connection to the ancient Greeks but, more importantly, by reinscribing Hellenistic and Byzantine culture into the ancestral narrative of modern Greece. “Τι εστι τωοντι γνησιος ελληνισµος, και τι νοθος;” (“what is really authentic Hellenism and what fake?”), he asks in his History.43 Both the question and his answer to it mirror the gatekeeper function of the Sphinx and the Gorgon. Authentic Hellenism for Paparrigopoulos includes Christianity, a marriage that others, including the Byzantines themselves, saw as incongruous. Even though as early as the twelfth century such bishops as Eustathios of Thessaloniki declared humanity to be divided into Hellene and barbarian, nevertheless some earlier ecclesiastical writers used Hellene as a term of exclusion to describe those who clung to their ancestral religion and refused to become Christians.44 Paparrigopoulos addresses this incongruity by attempting to demonstrate the cultural integrity of the Greeks, an integrity that, for him, guarantees the physiologically indemonstrable case of their racial integrity.45 The historian, Paparrigopoulos posits, should be able see the unity in the constant flux of ideas, to detect the continuity in change. Can anybody deny, he asks, “the close bond of national unity” (“τον στενον δεσµον της εθνικης ενοτητος”) in England because of the significant differences in public and private life that occurred between Elizabeth’s and Victoria’s reigns?46 He could not, when it came to Greece. That is why he argued for the

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revival of Byzantium as an indisputable linear link between antiquity and modernity. He criticizes European historians for delegating the Greek state’s history (“ιστοριαν του κρατους τουτου”) to a secondary level of importance in world history since, according to them, the Byzantines did not contribute anything new towards the progress of civilization, participating, instead, in the preservation of antiquity’s ruins. In contrast, “we Greeks,” he says, “need to pay special attention to Byzantine history, because it is to the Byzantine state that we mostly owe the preservation of our language, our religion and our nationality.”47 In his scheme, Alexander played the role of forerunner of Byzantium since it was the spread of the Greek language eastwards through his conquests that prepared the way for Christianity, through which the Greek nation itself survived and flourished.48 To the claim of “some historians” that “Alexander’s politics did not tend to Hellenize Asia, but to Asiatize Greece,” he concedes that “speaking of the Hellenism in Asia” we “do not mean that the two cardinal virtues of ancient Greece— intellectual freedom and high-mindedness—were ever disseminated into Asia.”49 For him these two virtues were part of the nontransferable property of the first Hellenic wave that could not be translated onto the hieratic monopoly of the Asiatic mode. Instead, they form the basis of the second wave of Hellenism, which includes Europe, since it also implicates knowledge in the institution of liberty, of secular and political action. Paparrigopoulos’, like all nineteenth-century national narrative, as Antonis Liakos points out, harbors in it a foundational discrepancy between its two central metaphors of continuity and resurrection. Liakos argues that the formation of national identity is predicated on a particular conception of time that generates a rearrangement of memory into narrative. A narrativized memory, however, cannot endure any gaps or discontinuities; continuity thus is essential to the very structure of national history and the metaphor of resurrection problematic since it “entails discontinuity.”50 Greek national history’s attempt to incorporate the ancient ideal into a narrative of continuity made inevitable the institution of a notion of decline, of a fall from grace, and resurrection. That fall, in European history, was understood as the Middle or Dark Ages. Modern historiography,

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however, through the romantic reappraisal of the Dark Ages, reinscribes that fall as a possible origin and limit of modernity, European modernity at least. Thus, as Thanos Veremis concludes, Paparrigopoulos’ reappraisal of “Greece’s medieval past may not have been incompatible with the European” one.51 The inscription of Byzantium into the ancestral narrative stemmed from Philhellenism’s demands for Greek modernity to demonstrate not only its genealogical link to Greek antiquity, the West’s cultural origins, but also to an equivalent, very European, middle. Paparrigopoulos was the historian who provided that link to what he calls “medieval Hellenism.”52 In its emphasis on continuity, his History is an example of Hans Blumenberg’s argument that continuity characterizes modernity’s discourse. For Blumenberg, unlike Foucault, the reality of history is that it does not begin entirely anew, despite its ruptures and discontinuities. Rather, history contains a continuity of problems and questions; modern philosophies of history, he suggests, do not break from but “reoccupy” earlier positions. He explicates this metaphor in terms of the contrast between “content” and “function.” “Totally heterogeneous contents,” he states, can “take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man’s interpretation of the world and himself.”53 In Paparrigopoulos’ History’s case the content is made up of the different ethnicities that, in the eyes of historians like Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790-1861) occupy Hellas. Fallmerayer’s work has had unequaled impact upon Neohellenism’s development. His very name has been “execrated in Greece from 1830 until our time as the symbol and epitome of antiGreek sentiment.”54 That execration, however, “was extraordinarily productive.”55 It led to “Greek self knowledge.”56 It was the fertile ground that produced the sudden flowering of folklore studies, history, philology and language studies, and “studies on character and customs;” all central to the institution of modern Greek national culture.57 A response to Fallmerayer’s thesis on the Greeks launched Paparrigopoulos’ career.58 Unlike Fallmerayer, who, responding to Philhellenist claims pushing for the dissolution of the Ottoman empire (an empire that he thought was necessary to stop the expansionism of Czarist Russia), argued that all cultural and racial

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traces of the Hellenes were extinguished by the Slavic invasions during the fifth century A.D., Paparrigopoulos sees these ethnicities as continuous and as directly linked to the ancient Greeks. Their function in his historiography was to justify the continuity of Greece in geographic terms by proving its continuity in historical time, thus supporting the interests of the dominant vision of Neohellenism. Fallmerayer’s Slavicization thesis jeopardized the claims of the modern Greek state and its European supporters. In both cases, two very different views of the ethnicity of the Greeks take on the identical function of shoring up the modern Greek national-cultural narrative.59 Despite Paparrigopoulos’ attempt to map Greece “ethnocratically” (a word he coined) and not ethnographically, that is, by identifying the “dominant race taking into account, as far as possible, natural borders, historical requirements, and traditional bonds,” there is no doubt that the territory that is Greece was multiethnic and, as we saw above, to be a Greek also contained the possibility of being a Slav.60 Of course, after the establishment of the Greek state, it was impossible to entertain this thought and remain part of the Greek national-cultural imaginary: its narrative, like all national narratives according to Benedict Anderson, is by definition characterized by homogeneity.61 Nowhere is this impossibility more visible than in the marginalization, certainly the diminishing, within the Greek national narrative of Rhigas Ferraios (also known as Βελεστινλης) (1757-1798), a central figure in pre-revolutionary Greek letters and a martyr to the revolution (killed in 1798 by Turks in Belgrade for revolutionary activities). His vision, in New Political Dispensation (1797), of a multinational state of the race (πολυκρατικον κρατος του γενους), a multi-ethnic one too (πολυεθνικον)—a republic in which Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Albanians, and Serbs, Christians, Muslims, Jews would live with equal rights, local autonomy, and collaborative rule, with the Greek element as the “leaven”—was rendered irrelevant since it contained a polyphony, typical of the territory of prerevolutionary Greece, that the new state apparatus could not include in its attempts to institute a national cultural narrative.62 Yet for at least a brief moment, Ferraios’ conception of the nation found reflection in political possibility when the Serbs and

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Montenegrins gained their independence in 1825 and 1826 from the Ottomans. Greeks argued that their Orthodox brethren, having gained their liberty, ought to be considered Hellenes and reckoned as members of the Hellenic race, forming a single state.63 In one 1821 revolutionary’s eyes, as late as 1853, the Serbian and Romanian principalities were as Greek as Peloponnesos.64 The marginalization of Ferraios’ vision of a multiethnic polity in favor of the homogeneous image of the national culture represented by Paparrigopoulos can be seen as an example of the statist view of history typical of the discourse on the “principle of nationality” from 1830 onwards.65 Influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history, which views the state as the highest expression of the spirit of history and hence as the principal body in the development of both history and historiography, this understanding of history links historicality to a providence realized in the development of the state. In Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel writes that a people or a nation lacks a history, not because it knows no writing, but because, lacking as it does statehood, it has nothing to write about. “It is the state which first supplies a content,” he says, “which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it.”66 Ferraios produced his history years before the establishment of the modern Greek state, and there were other histories of Greece before his as well.67 All, however, if one were to follow the Hegelian chronology, were written before history; hence, they are foreknowledge or intuition, myths, and not the prose of history, which is necessarily attached to the higher reality of the state and its position in world history, defined by Hegel as “nothing more than the plan of providence.”68 The incorporation of the Orthodox church into the revolutionary Greek state as one of its ideological foundations, an incorporation which confirmed at the level of governmental institutions the inclusion of Byzantine history into the unbroken narrative of the nation, tended to naturalize on the level of ideology the providential character of the state in a way that the “evangelische Kirche” never managed to do in Hegel’s admired Prussia. Ferraios’ diasporic, multicultural, autonomous-local and highly secular vision could have no place in such a statist historical teleology: at best it could be consigned to

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the prehistory of the Revolution. In contrast, the quasi-theocratic character of the State ensured the harmonious integration of Hellenism and providentialism in Paparrigopoulos’ History. Hence, following the Greek state’s policy at the time, Paparrigopoulos writes of the “miracle” of Alexander, “through [whom] the inscrutable ways of providence [and] the spread of Hellenism had been accomplished:” his conquests allowed for the dissemination of the Greek language and its dissemination in and of the New Testament.69 Founded on a notion of resurrection, even as it is arguing continuity, Paparrigopoulos’ History is the concretization of the nation’s holy mission. He believes that all history is such a concretization, thus making all historians prophets.70 By contrast, Ferraios’ vision was secular, influenced by the French Revolution’s Declaration of Human Rights that he translated. His Map of Hellas (Χαρτα της Ελλαδος) identifies Greece as the Ottoman empire’s central lands, without being the ecclesiastical Rum millet (comprised of all different ethnic groups with different languages but of the same religion, Orthodoxy). Not distinguishing between dates in use and those belonging to the past, the Map includes the colonies and settlements of the ancient and Hellenistic periods, Byzantine Greece, and the Greek “colonies” of more recent times, those created by the Phanariot families in the Balkans. Hellas in Ferraios’ work appears as “the secular, liberal facet of the Rum millet,” a national space that is simultaneously historical and multicultural.71 One could argue that Ferraios was a prophet of sorts too: he predicted the polyphony of which the Greek state would be a part, its nationalism having to conform to the transnationalist one of the European Union. Meanwhile, his choice of myth when it came to answering the Gorgon on Alexander, and his faith in the prophetic qualities of the historian, render Paparrigopoulos’ vision also a prehistory, in Hegelian terms, even though it was part of the new state’s apparatus. This contradiction explains the dislocation of the present evident in his work.72 His reading of Alexander as the Greek who succeeded in purging the Greek nation of the curse of centuries of disunion, and in doing so offered 1860s Greece the historical analogue of nation building, thereby demonstrating that the expansionist objectives of Hellenism (the “Great Idea”) might not be futile,

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constitutes Greece’s modernity as a transitional phase to an indeterminate yet definite future. The present, in this schema, is transitory, unstable, since it remains, in relation to the glorious past that grants its signification, inadequate, as it is also inadequate to future glories (in this instance the geographical realization of the “Great Idea”).73 Threatened with relegation to the margins of history by the very process whose course it helps to redirect, the present in Paparrigopoulos’ text must constantly reassert itself in order to perform its function of shoring up Neohellenic identity. Such a reassertion is typical of (European) modernity, whose characteristics, as I discussed in Chapter One, are the exclusive valorization of the historical (as opposed to chronological) present over the past, openness towards an indeterminate future, and a tendential elimination of the historical present itself. The product of an act of historical self-definition through differentiation, identification, and projection that transcends the order of chronology, an act of the imagination, a dream, this present is contained, as it is produced, in national narratives like Paparrigopoulos’. Ferraios’ multifarious present is this dream’s nightmare. Thus, even though Ferraios was the map-maker, Paparrigopoulos created borders, visible and invisible, in ways that Ferraios did not. Paparrigopoulos offered the nation a “rule of exclusion” that it could use, as all nations do, to resist “the suppression or indefinite extension of borders:” he gave it a measure of Greekness.74 Its outline matched then contemporary Greek realities better than Ferraios’ because it reflected both what the Greeks had in mind for themselves, a homogeneous nation in a state of their own, and what the European benefactors wanted Greece to be, the repository of a state of mind, Europe’s example to itself of the universal.75 According to Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, however, universality only happens once to a given nation. A nation cannot pass through several successive stages in world history or make its mark in it more than once. If it were possible for genuinely new interests to arise within a nation, the national spirit would have to be in a position to will something new. This new element could only take the shape of a higher and more universal conception of itself, a progression beyond its own principle—but this would mean that a further determinate principle, i.e. a new spirit, was already

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present. In world history, a nation can be dominant only once, because it can only have one task to perform within the spiritual process. Greece, then, in this chronology has had its day: its historical task was to be the origin of Europe; its current task is to be its ruins.76 Paparrigopoulos’ linkage of antiquity and Byzantium attempts a new vision: he offers the Helleno-Christian civilization of the new Hellas as a superior form of Hellenism and Christianity. Ferraios’ vision of Hellas—based on the unprecedented combination of western ideals, Ottoman territories, and Balkan realities—could not manifest itself as new in the Hegelian sense since otherness, especially of the “Asiatic” kind, was something against which Europe long guarded itself with Greece as its center/border.77 The usual political critique of Hegel is to say that his work finds excuses for everything, that because he “places all of history and reality upon a diagram, everything fits in.”78 This is the case with Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in which Hegel’s concentration on the state as the center of man’s place in the world is a strategy of containment and a means of mapping reality onto a diagram. “Walled in by the state and its historiography,” writes Ranajit Guha in History at the Limits of History, “the citizen is cut off from his historicality as a citizen of the world.”79 This is true of the citizen in Paparrigopoulos’ text: walled in by the state, he is cut off from his historicality as a transnational citizen. Ferraios’ work breaks this wall and helps us to rethink citizenship at a time when the borders of Europe are multiple, and their walls, “essential for state institutions, ” are “profoundly inadequate for an account of the complexity of real situations,” of the “topology underlying the sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent mutual relations between the identities constitutive of European history,” particularly its southernmost tip.80 Homogenizing the Territory

It is difficult to imagine citizenship without the nation-state, a form it is “naturally” attached to. A quick view of history shows us that the foundations of modern nation-states are to be found in insurrections,

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declarations of independence or constitutions of “peoples,” and that even nations constituted “from above” need to be democratically “refounded” by a transfer of the marks of sovereignty to the people or at least a pretense to have received these marks from the people. The “people” in these nation-states are the citizens, whose social rights (the result of the class struggle during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) are inscribed in the “fundamental rights” guaranteed by their constitution and serving in return as its foundation. The same quick view of history also shows us that the nation-state thus constituted holds in its folds an ongoing double genesis of the citizen and his rights: one “birth” links liberty to autonomy as self-regulation, the other to autonomy as selfownership.81 The first of these origins, or productions, of citizenship and rights is found in Rousseau, Kant, and Habermas, who all see the citizen as author of the law to which he must conform by disciplining himself (with a certain degree of cruelty, as the work of Freud shows). The second is found in Spinoza, Locke, and most proponents of multicultural citizenship: they see autonomy as ownership of the actions of one’s body and the thoughts of one’s mind, thus locating liberty in relation to exchange, or reciprocity and reciprocal utility. Equality, in the former, resides in the reversal of the formerly hierarchical characteristics of sovereignty into egalitarian ones; in the latter, it resides not only in the recognition of an equal status with respect to the nation-state’s public institutions, but also in the exercise of equal opportunity or at least the opportunity to exercise equal opportunity.82 In both instances, the very category of the citizen presupposes the existence of outsiders, aliens, to the nation-state’s membership; it also presupposes a divide between the two. Unlike other groups who suffer social exclusion (women and minorities, for example) and whose historical exclusion has come to be seen as unjust, aliens are marginalized despite their central role in transnational political/cultural transactions and the global economy.83 In the USA, evidence of this is found not only in federal policies such as the recent Immigration Act proposed by the Bush Administration, but also in the realm of culture, as evidenced in the criticism Martha Nussbaum received when she called for Americans to educate their children as “citizens of the world.”84 In Europe nationalisms still

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abound, despite calls for the need permanently to recreate the community of citizens on the basis of their differences and conflicts, without allowing for any “autochthonism” or for the inherited “capital” or privilege of the “first occupant.”85 The establishment of the sovereign Greek state has followed the above nation-state building process with the same citizen/alien problematic. Autochthonism, as we saw, is embedded in its constitution and its citizenship acts from as early as 1844. Greece has a jus sanguinis system, one in which nationality is passed on from parent to child only, making naturalizations of non-ethnic Greeks rare. The Greek Constitution, in its first Article (paragraph three), differentiates between the “nation” and the “people.” While the second term denotes Greek citizens, the first is related to the concept of genos, i.e. the race. Genos during late Byzantine times was linked with the race of Greeks wherever they were; it became interchangeable with ethnos in the late eighteenth century, and it was only after the establishment of the state in 1832 that the two were separated: ethnos was used for the Greeks within the state (hence it means nation) and genos for all Greeks, citizens and diaspora.86 In the course of the evolution of the citizenship law, the term genos became the key element of Greekness and an actual legal category distinguishing between those who are of Greek descent and those who are not. The first group, homogeneis (“people of the same descent”) are deemed Greek regardless of their actual citizenship status. The latter group, allogeneis (“people of a different descent”) are non-Greek, even if they possess Greek citizenship. This distinction between homogeneis and allogeneis mirrors the distinction between citizenship and nationality. The evolution of polities along the lines of state formation gave citizenship in the West its full institutionalized and formalized character and made nationality a key component of citizenship. Both citizenship and nationality refer to the nation-state. While the same in concept, each reflects a different legal framework. Both identify the legal status of an individual in terms of state membership, but citizenship is mainly confined to the national dimension, while nationality refers to the international dimension of an interstate system.87 Reflecting the national dimensions of citizenship, the homogeneity of Greece is

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built upon the elements of religion (Greek-Orthodox), language (Greek), national consciousness and an ambiguous conceptualization of “Greek descent.” Thus, alterity in Greece may be described in terms that are religious (Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses), linguistic (Turkish, Arvanite, Roma, Vlach, SlavoMacedonian/Pomak), or ethnic/national (Turks, Macedonians, Jews, Armenians, Pomaks, Roma). This “traditional” alienness was enriched during the 1990s by the massive settlement of immigrants, mostly from Albania and from the former Soviet Union, who represented 10% of the population in Greece in 2004.88 These immigrants brought the question of nationality to the fore in discussions of citizenship in a way that had not been addressed since the establishment of the modern Greek nation-state. Having been primarily a country of emigration rather than immigration until the 1990s, Greece scrambled to produce legislation on immigration beginning in 1991, 1996-7, and 2001. The bills that came out of these efforts had several homes: the 1991 bill was drafted as a security measure and was implemented primarily by the Ministry of Public Order; the Employment Ministry played the lead role in the 1996-7 legalizations of immigrants, and the 2001 immigration bill was the responsibility of the Interior Ministry. This changing locus of policymaking shows the changing way in which immigrants are viewed by policymakers in Greece: first they are seen as a threat, then as workers, and finally as people with rights and duties. One of these rights is that of citizenship, promoted by such supranational institutions as the EU and the European Court of Human Rights, and an international human rights regime that limits (in the best scenario) state ability to act in contravention of such rights. Offering rights to immigrants requires a reinvention of Greek citizenship, a return to the future of Ferraios’ pre-revolutionary formulation of the Constitution in which all residents of the Greek state, regardless of religion and language, were to be regarded citizens. Ferraios’ vision, as we know, was lost in the early, typical of all, nation-building efforts of Greece and its neutralization of other temporalities and spatialities.89 Legislation on Greek citizenship reflects the historical path of that effort. Citizenship policy during the first decades of the Greek state

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was mainly oriented towards incorporating the heterochthonous homogeneis (aliens of “Greek descent” living abroad) who were then settling in Greece. In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1912-13), and as part of the “Great Idea,” Greece almost doubled its territory and population.90 Large allogeneis populations, former Ottoman subjects, were “hostages” in the expanded Greek territory. At the same time, significant numbers of Greek-Orthodox populations or Greek speakers were left to reside beyond the borders of Greece. Through a process of population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919 and Greece and Turkey in 1923, the violent expulsion of Albanian Chams from Epirus in 1944 and the expulsion of Slav-Macedonians from Northern Greece during the Civil War, either through its own direct actions or through that of others, like that of the Nazis and their the extermination of the Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki, Greece minimized the presence of Greek citizens of non-Greek descent (allogeneis) and assembled a significant number of aliens of Greek descent (homogeneis) to whom Greek citizenship was granted de jure in the “motherland” (the only requirement was a three-year residency). Clearly, descent is of crucial ideological importance for citizenship regulations in Greece. People of Greek descent, however, could also be excluded from their “blood community” for their political beliefs. This was the case with communists during and after the Civil War (1946-1949), when 22,266 deprivations of citizenship were imposed between 1948 and 1963 with 135 decrees or ministerial decisions.91 A Circular signed by the Minister of the Interior (of 14.3.1947) maintained that the 1927 decree on the deprivation of citizenship could also be applied against those persons of Greek descent who have proved, by their anti-national behavior, that they are lacking the appropriate national consciousness.92 In an attempt at conciliation, those who had fled Greece during the Civil War were later allowed to repatriate. They became part of the community of homogeneis, along with Greeks from Istanbul, Southern Albania, and the RussoPontians (Greeks from the ex-USSR). Each of these homogeneis’ roads to citizenship has been uneven, for some nonexistent, despite all having Greek descent. Some, like the Pontians, had access to citizenship (Law 2790/2000, amended by Laws 2910/2001 and

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3013/2002) and to favorable welfare benefits not available to Greek citizens, the most important one, reminiscent of the 1840s, being that they could become civil servants. Others, like the Greeks from Turkey, held a strange form of quasi-citizenship: a highly confidential Ministerial Council decision dated 3.1.1976 stated that Greeks from Turkey not holding Turkish passports could get Greek passports but not Greek citizenship. Greek Albanians, meanwhile, have no access to citizenship, only a special Identity Card of Homogeneis, (Law 1975/1991, art. 17, amended by Ministerial Decision n. 4000/3/10/1998 and Common Ministerial Decision 4000/3/10-e/2002, Ministries of Interior, Foreign Affairs, Public Order, Labor and Defence).93 The heterogeneity of citizenship in Greece is not uncharacteristic of most nations. Even though in one sense there is only one kind of citizenship (the one that counts in the eyes of the state), in another there are “as many as there are roles in the complex ‘civil societies’ that are organized into nations.”94 Today these roles are quite different from those of earlier times. Globalization has destabilized national state-centered hierarchies of legitimate power and allegiance, enabling a multiplication of non-formalized or only partly formalized political dynamics and actors.95 This unsettlement highlights the changeability and variability of the rights-bearing subject that is the citizen and illustrates the need for what Balibar calls “citizenship without community,” which he sees as a dialectic between constituent and constituted citizenship, that is, a dialectic between facts on the ground and imagined communities.96 In Greece this dialectic expresses itself in the clash between the idea of the nation’s homogeneity, consciously grounded by the Greek state, and the fact of its historical and current heterogeneity. Conceptualizations of aliens and alienness in relation to territoriality have their origin in Kant’s vision of rights in his political writings, in particular in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Project For Perpetual Peace.” “Hospitality,” Kant writes in a passage that exemplifies what he envisions perpetual peace to be, “means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.” He distinguishes the stranger’s right from those of a guest:

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the former “may only claim a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface.” Yet, despite this right, the stranger “can be turned away,” preferably “without causing his death,” although all bets are off if he does not behave in a peaceable manner wherever he happens to be.97 Reflecting the conditional nature of rights in Kant’s text is the shift we see from his ideal of world citizenship in “Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Practice” to his grudging concession, in “Perpetual Peace,” that we ought to allow foreigners to travel unmolested, provided that they do not stay too long, and that they behave as we want them to.98 In this, Étienne Balibar’s vision, in We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, differs from Kant’s. It also differs from the Kantian vision’s contemporary life in other current negotiations (updated to account for the multicultural and postnational world in which we live) of cosmopolitanism and citizens’ rights that call for benevolent recognition or are humanitarian pleas for inclusion.99 Rather than repeating the initial choices of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, sovereigntism, federalism, and so on, Balibar envisions a state that would allow for the element of infinity to be inscribed in its notion of citizenship at its origin and periodically reinscribed in terms of “right to have rights.”100 In other words, difficult as this would be, he wants the state to be responsible for the rights of its citizens, “foreign” and not, but not to be obliged to honor them, as is more often than not the case. Greece, found in breach of the European Human Rights Convention on ethnic and linguistic minorities, is one of those countries so obliged.101 It is not always compliant, even though according to Article 28 of the Greek Constitution the Convention is an integral part of Greek law.102 Its policy towards the Muslim community in Western Thrace, for example, defined by the Treaty of Lausanne (Art. 10 and 41), illustrates the dialectic of constituted and constituent citizenship and the ideological nature of law.103 Article 16 of the Constitution safeguards “freedom of teaching” and stipulates that the purpose of education is the development of the national and religious consciousness of the pupils. Things get

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complicated when education concerns the Turk-Muslims of Western Thrace. For, if one were to take Article 16 at face value, and not in the way it was intended as Greek national consciousness and religion, how is one to interpret the religious criterion but as the exclusive teaching of Islam for the Turk-Muslims? Article 2, Law 694/1977 states that the aim of the “minority school” is to “provide the spiritual and moral development of the students in accordance with the basic purposes of general education and the principles governing the curricula of the corresponding public schools of the country.”104 The public schools of the country, however, promote the Greek national consciousness to all students. Minority education thus finds itself in the impossible position of having to represent its own constituency and the constitution of the country: it has to maintain and erase identity and difference simultaneously.105 The Greek state, meanwhile, can argue that it fulfills its obligation towards minority education. On Rights

“How can we inscribe responsibility as a right rather than an obligation?” asks Gayatri Spivak in Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet, the inaugural of a lecture series sponsored by the Foundation Dialogik to “give critical impetus to the debate on refugee policy and the politics of migration.”106 Only if we mix the empirical with the rational, is her answer, found in most of her work, marked as it is by an investment in historicity and the practice of its theory. She exemplifies her question (and its answer) in her reading of Kant, in which she introduces “the empirical and anthropological” in “a philosophical text that,” she tells us, “slowly leads us toward the rational study of morals as such.”107 Spivak’s main target is to show the ways in which the structure of Kant’s writings about aesthetic and teleological judgment provides access to practical reason and hence forces the compulsions of will and moral law and therefore the demands of freedom (really freedom to desire and hence one of the faculties of the mind). For Spivak this freedom (recognized as a trope) repeatedly operates as a compulsion in Kant’s text to assume both an intelligent being and a moral author of the world.108 She

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argues that the unacknowledged field on which the Kantian architectonic becomes possible is imperialism, based on moral education and a repudiation (or foreclosure) of the “savage” or “raw man” whom Kant reads, she tells us, as “naturally” alien to culture, hence impossible “to culture.”109 Spivak’s deconstructive reading of Kant, in which she introduces the empirical to the philosophical, echoes, as deconstructive readings tend to do, what Manfred Riedel, in “Transcendental Politics? Political Legitimacy and the Concept of Civil Society in Kant,” sees as already operating in Kant’s work.110 While Kant was “the first philosopher to consistently maintain the distinction between fact and norm in the theory of the contract or, formulated in modern terms, the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive statements,” writes Reidel, nevertheless, in his construction of the contract of civil society “he tacitly reintroduces empirical concepts into the normative approach….[and] thereby contradicts the underlying premises of the transcendental construction.”111 As Riedel argues, identifying in Kant’s work “the fundamental aporia” that grounds Spivak’s reading, his “concept of right which merely seems to imply mutual freedom and equality has as its consequence one-sided dependency and renewed inequality.”112 This is so because Kant, even though he claims the “a priori,” hence “pure,” nature of his three principles of external human right—the freedom of every member of society as a human being; the equality of each with all others as a subject; and the independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen— nevertheless subsumes his principle of the “independence” of the citizen under the category of “property.”113 A citizen, for Kant, is someone who “serves no one but the commonwealth” and not someone who earns his living by “allowing others to make use of him.”114 “The journeyman…the domestic servant…all females,” he writes, “and in general everyone who does not obtain the means of his existence through is own trade, but rather is necessitated to acquire them by being at the disposal of others, is not a civil personality and his existence is, as it were, merely an accident.”115 It is not that Kant is arguing here (along with the post-FrenchRevolution proponents of the legal or feudal theory of the

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consequences of ownership of land, Romantic and conservative alike) that only those who have property are citizens; rather, for him, as Riedel explains, “dominion over a household is not required in order to be, as a citizen, one’s own master;” it is sufficient to be able to buy and sell any piece of property and thus work one’s way up from the “passive status to the active one.”116 This is how “independence” is subsumed under the category of “property” and, in being so, introduced into “the contingent sphere of commodity exchange in society,” writes Reidel. As a consequence, he concludes, “independence as a privilege of the ‘citizen’ becomes the right of ‘man,’ a right that ‘everybody’ can acquire,” at a price, of course.117 In the history of the rights of man, as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the National Assembly of France taught us in the eighteenth century, that price is the sacrificing of all other alliances and authorities to the sovereignty of the nation (disguised as the question of culture, uni- or multi-). “One hundred and fifty years later,” Spivak tells us, in “Righting Wrongs,” a lecture she gave at Oxford’s Amnesty International series, “the human rights aspect of postcoloniality has turned out to be the breaking of the new nations, in the name of the breaking-in into the international community of nations.”118 This is the price of human rights today, and there are examples of it everywhere. They range from the most obvious ones, as in the case of military interventions, to more subtle ones like aid workers, NGOs, organizations like Doctors without Borders. We, her readers, are among them. As well-meaning academics produced in the European ethical traditions of Kant, Hegel, and/or Marx, we belong to a culture that has already accommodated “these three fellows” and represent the figure of the Native Informant defined by Spivak as the necessary complicity in any strategy of academic reading.119 For Spivak, teachers in the humanities play a key role in normalizing the alliance between capitalism, development, and human rights. She consistently shows us how to face the humanities and teaches those of us working in them how to excavate our complicities with imperialism and postcolonialism. “Education in the humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of desires,” she writes in “Righting Wrongs.”120 In the history of “our” (read European) culture desire (read compulsion) is rearranged towards

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morality. The ethical imperative, however, is not grounded by rational knowledge alone. “There is another space—or script,” she suggests, “which drives us,” like our relationship to language, which is “outside us” and yet “in us” in terms of our ability to use it to know the world through it.121 What she calls cultures of responsibility (subaltern) have such a “script.” As opposed to rights-based cultures (like that of Kant), responsibility-based cultures, “when they work, base the agency of responsibility in that outside of the self that is also in the self, halfarchived and therefore not directly accessible.”122 Such cultures, in their understanding of subjectivity, keep alive “the parts of the mind not accessible to reason.”123 They keep alive, to return to the opening metaphor of this chapter, the Gorgon, or the encounter with the Gorgon, never foreclosing their “rawness” in their effort to be in the family of “Man.”

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On Homogeneity: Between “eethnos” and “etthnikos”

Economics and politics determined my understanding of Greekness. Growing up in Greece, I never thought of Greece. That only happened when, at the age of eight, my parents, fleeing their junta-governed home, moved to Australia and we became part of Melbourne’s two hundred and fifty thousand Greeks. From then on “Greek” was always something that prefaced and conditioned my being Australian. As such, it was the mark of my migrant status and not my Greekness, certainly not my Australianess since, for Australians, even in the age of multiculturalism, Greeks and other immigrants serve to enhance “international awareness” and not citizenship. Hellenism, on the other hand, I thought a lot about. I had no choice: it was part of a strangely converging Greek and Australian education. Whether it was taught as the legacy of “our glorious ancestors” or as the “legacy of the Greeks” the message was the same: Greece was the origin of Western culture, the “yardstick” against which we measure “ourselves.” For me that measuring stick was a double-edged sword whose sharpness I felt primarily at school—the place where I spent most of my time and the place, as we saw in Chapter Two, where Hellenism was founded. Always asked to translate any chanced-upon Ancient Greek, the automatic assumption being that as a Greek I could, I quickly realized that my modern Greekness was going to be

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a problem in my negotiation of Australia’s residual Hellenism. When I could translate the text, I was living proof of the tradition of Hellenism and my immigrant or “ethnic” status was forgotten. My difference from my Australian classmates legitimated as highcultural inheritance, I was lauded for my knowledge. When I could not translate the text, my status as a modern Greek suddenly came to the fore to confirm in the eyes of my teachers and classmates what was always in their mind (and, as we saw in Chapter Two, in the minds of Greece’s initial observers): that modern Greeks were the degenerate remnants of Pericles’ race intermixed with Slavs.1 Being a Greek immigrant added to my devaluation as all the stereotypes of that particular category—crude, uneducated shop owners—rushed in when my translating powers failed me.2 Interestingly, translation was also the means through which I was forced to negotiate my Greekness among the Greeks in Australia. A first generation migrant who lived her life in five year intervals between Greece and Australia, I was not a Greek-Australian “proper.” My access to the “mother country” more direct and hence more contemporarily European than the time-lagged memory of earlier Greek migrants, I represented a contemporary version of Greece whose practices of everyday life my fellow Greek-Australians associated with Australia. In order to belong, I had to translate these practices into the lagged version of Greekness of the Greek-Australians and, in essence, write my experience of Greece out. Continually forced to translate my Greekness against a Hellenic ideal or against the stereotype of the Greek-Australian and those against the ideal Australian and the ideal Greek, my sense of self was formed in this multiple trafficking of identity. One could say that my story is the perfect example of Australia’s rich multicultural heritage: a testament to its commitment to diversity and its disavowal of the earlier British only immigration policy. After all, not only was my family’s application to immigrate accepted in Australia (it was not in Germany and the USA) but we were also encouraged to practice our culture. Such a practice, however, had its cost. For me it involved (and still involves) a continuous erasure of the present in the name of either a glorious and uniform past or a bright (not ethnically involved) future of hybridity. The first of these

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divestments from the present is scripted by the story of Greek nationalism, the second by the story of Australian multiculturalism. Situated between ethnos and ethnikos, my present, like every “ethnic” writer’s present, was (and is) divided against itself.3 “Schizophenia,” or the compensatory development of a philosophy of desire found in utopian celebrations of such a present’s hybridity—as I argued in Chapter One—does not provide one with a “genuinely dialectical attempt to think of our present of time in history.” Neither does the standard world-system estimation of ethnicity that tells us that: “Seen in long historical time and broad world space, [nations and ethnic groups] fade into one another, becoming only ‘groups.’ Seen in short historical time and narrow world space, they become clearly defined and so form distinctive structures.”4 I share Spivak’s discomfort with the “long” view of this argument. “The long view and the broad space are so perspectivized,” she argues, “that to learn to acquire them in order to produce correct descriptions may be useful only if supplemented unceasingly, not just by way of the popular US T-shirt slogan, ‘Think globally act locally,’ although it is not a bad start.”5 Clearly reflecting the world-system’s first view of ethnicity, official Greek history tells us that Greece emerged out of the multinational Ottoman empire to form the distinctive structure of the “Greek” nation due to the conjunction of interests between diasporic intellectuals, a rising merchant class, and a restless indigenous population. This very same history, however, also shows us that the distinctive structure that the Greeks formed was so perspectival—its groups were even more heterogeneous than before the 1821 revolution, its cultural and economic heterogeneity greater—that it took an act of ideological faith (which in Greek history, as we saw in the case of Paparrigopoulos, manifested itself as a belief in its continuity) to maintain that this heterogeneity became homogeneous. Not only did these groups not fade into each other, but, as we saw in Chapter Three, they were also the cause of bitter struggles over the right to name and “own” the new Hellas. These are struggles that exist today as Greeks persist in negotiating the ethnos with what visionaries of the new world in which ethnicity fades into the distant past would call “archaic” ferocity. Eric Hobsbawm,

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one of the leading theorists of nations and nationalism, might well argue that “the call of ethnicity or language provides no guidance to the future at all,” but in Greece, as well as most places in the world today, it is still being heeded.6 Now, as at the nation’s institution, that call echoes in Greece’s negotiations of its diaspora around which some Greeks still organize a neo-Byzantinist imperialist fantasy, while most just seek a place for it. The lingering questions of Greece’s cultural (and in some instances geographical) borders that ensue out of this latest negotiation of Hellenicity testify that, despite the post-revolutionary “national” culture’s attempts to reproduce a homogeneous image, Greece’s “polyphony” has not developed into a well-modulated (and unified) Neohellenic logos. The view shared by most Western commentators about the Balkans is that this polyphony (cacophony, some say) is another example of modernity’s antique dreams. One can also see it, however, as an illustration of how, despite the West’s understanding of it as (its own) absolute identity, otherness also inhabits Hellenicity both as fantasy—the West’s or the Greek national discourse’s—and as reality—that of transnational, or homogeneis, Greeks. Modern Greece, both culturally and economically, was, in the main part, founded by homogeneis.7 They were diasporic Greeks (merchants and intellectuals) with a cultural and economic homogeneousness despite their heterogeneous geographical location. As we saw in Chapter Three, they held in common the West’s idea of Greece as culture’s origin and they shared their “host” nation’s economic interest, initially in the Ottoman empire and, later, in the newly established Greek kingdom. Theirs was an ideologically produced feeling for Greece that was useful in hiding their real, economic, interests. As an example of the reinscription of the economic in the Greek social text, it is their moment in Greek history that this chapter puts “under erasure” in order to trace its effects on the current circulation of Greekness. Initially disguising their interests as generous gifts of education and culture (they funded poetry competitions, established schools, and erected buildings, such as the Academy and the Observatory, all in the image of their European homes), by the 1870s—the first phase of Greece’s industrialization—these diasporic Greeks ceased to bother with the

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camouflage: it was then that they “came to demand their dues.”8 The Greek state was able to repay in kind what it received in ideological education; as for the buildings and the infrastructure, it remained a debtor. One of its methods of loan repayment was also a repayment in kind—humankind. It exported labor power to the various centers of the Greek diaspora and, in doing so, ensured the continuing influx of “homogeneous” capital (cultural and economic) into Greece.9 It is these “exports,” and others like them, necessitated by later, but similar, economic transactions between Greece and “nonhomogeneous” investors (the USA, Europe, Australia), that now make the return to Greece. These self-named latter-day Odyssei, however, are not the Croesi (or the Crusoes) of old: today’s homogeneis Greeks are not the nineteenth-century’s wealthy investors in Greek futures. Rather, they are the dispossessed ethnic minorities of places like Albania, Georgia, Romania: in other words, of most of the countries of the former Eastern bloc, who after the break-up of the Soviet Union could more freely (be made to) come and go. They are Greeks whose ancestors had lived there since those early migrations (for that is where most of the centers of Greek diasporic wealth were); and Greeks who had no option but to go there after the civil war of the late forties since, as communists, they would either have been jailed or killed in right wing Greece. They are predominantly poor, sometimes non-Greek-speaking, culturally different displaced people whose part in the negotiation of Hellenism would be a mistake to lump with that of the founders of the Greek nation-state just because they are also diasporic. Their voice does not have the economic muscle of those earlier immigrants and, in the struggle for audience in the competitive economic, ideological and cultural location that is modern Greece, it is usually overshadowed by the louder sounds of the “homogeneous” but different diasporic voices of the “Greeks from abroad:” Greek-Americans, -Germans, -Swedes, -Australians. Despite their apparent triumphant Odyssean return (a common theme among Greeks of the diaspora), these other homogeneis have their own history as immigrant imports. In the case of GreekAustralians, for they are my focus in this chapter, they are part of a

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long history of immigration to Australia based on the Wakefield Project’s “art of colonization.” Authored by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and championed by J. S. Mill, it formulated the means through which white settler colonies such as South Africa, New Zealand and Australia were populated.10 Its basic premise was that if the initial investment was made, expense for subsequent transportation would be paid for out of the surplus generated from capital exports, that is, the prospect of available labor in these colonies that would encourage capital holders to emigrate. The Wakefield project tradition, in the form of post-World-War-II accumulation and expansion and the need to produce and absorb labor power and capital surpluses that will either spill outwards as capital exports or inwards as immigrant imports, was also the blueprint for the policies that allowed the immigration of most of the six hundred and fifty thousand Greeks who make up part of multicultural Australia.11 These immigrants are also claimed by Greece as nationals.12 Whereas, however, their contribution to Greece (in the form of obligatory military service, incoming foreign exchange, businesses) is seen, in fact solicited, by the Greek state as their national duty, their contribution to the Australian state is solicited only to raise “international awareness.”13 So despite the fact that they are citizens, Australian Greeks are ethnic (foreign) in Australia and, as such, not part of the nation (ethnos), but only of its culture—which, the same report also tells us, was always multicultural. A compromise formation that emerged in the 1970s, designed to pacify the increasingly volatile “ethnic” communities on the one hand and allay the fears of the dominant Anglo-Celtic community disturbed by the changing demographics on the other, multiculturalism became the means though which the ethnic diversity of the Australian nation could be contained.14 Its originality lies in the gentle displacement of the English heritage from a normative position and its reinvention of Australia as something other than an ethnic project. “We are a nation of immigrants” was the most popular Bicentennial celebration theme in 1988. It was also a slogan of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, despite Australia’s recent climate of increasing intolerance towards its immigrants.15

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To the negative past of Anglo-Australia’s attempts to produce uniformity by erasing its citizens’ different ethnicities, contemporary Australian policy makers and cultural practitioners superimpose and offer to all Australians a positive multicultural past in which “we are all immigrants,” which, in effect, also erases its citizens’ different ethnicities. In this version of the nation’s history, the Aborigines, Australia’s “first migrants,” since they were not homogeneous and since they had such disparate ways of life, were always multicultural.16 The British component, because it was made up of “Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Cornish communities,” was also multicultural. Hence, by association, through the simultaneous equivalence of the experience of migration, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, English and Aboriginal pasts become “our” Australian past. Dehistoricized, their only history their narrative connection in the story of multiculturalism, the events of each of these very different experiences of migration become the circumstantial and physical details that confirm the fiction that has Australia as multicultural at the origin and hence always already an ethnic project.17 This is the past that multiculturalism wants to leave behind in the name of a new present where ethnicity is a thing of the past and multiculturalism—which is only concerned with “groups”—has a bright future. This kind of wishful thinking certainly reflects the postmodern transformation of ethnicity into a general neo-ethnicity that overcomes the problem of history’s disjunctive character by reunifying its disjunctions in the image. Thus it opens the hall of mirrors for the nation in which the “people,” longing to be a “people” but “feeling its own ontological lack, longs for its own impossible stability and narcissistically attempts, in a variety of rituals, to recuperate a being that never existed in the first place.”18 Among these rituals is the production of fictions of origin: narratives like that of the always already multicultural Australia or that of modern Greece’s phoenix-like rising out of the ashes of “oriental” barbarism in order to collect its dues. The focus of most recent efforts to study the imaginary of the nation has been on tracing how such fictions are integrally implicated in its historical production and the ideological reproduction of “Europe.”19 My inquiry into the means that produce such rituals and

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their fictions (with its reading of fiction writing itself as one of the rituals) is part of these efforts. In this chapter, it is my contention that the desire called multiculturalism (manifested in government reports, literary and cultural practices) uses the conceptual tools of that other, earlier, desire called Hellenism in order to “realize” itself as original. In the process of this “realization,” it ends up maintaining Hellenism’s construction of culture as a privileged discourse concerned with the definition of core values. In doing so, it undermines its claim to newness and avoids dealing in any concretely different way with present multicultural Australia. Greek Australia, meanwhile, uses those very same tools (sometimes ironically other times not) to negotiate a present in Australia. The same fiction of Greece as origin of Western culture has two totally different functions with two totally different outcomes. The first fortifies a “national” culture against ethnic attacks; the second uses its ethnicity (which, after having internalized the lessons of European Hellenism, it mistakes as universal) as a means of contesting the proclaimed universality and the cultural exclusivity of always already multicultural Australia. To criticize Greek-Australians’ preoccupation with ethnicity as archaic is to ignore its present cultural and political use in contesting not only their Australian but also their Greek modernity’s archaic dreams. To read their invocation of otherness as a fantasy is to ignore the caprices of history’s transnational negotiation and to conflate ethnos and ethnikos. After all, it is one thing when the articulation of one’s otherness is taken on as a national fantasy and another when it is imposed on one as a means of managing another’s. Dreams of the time: Australian cultural histories

Not too long ago most Australian commentators felt the need to justify not only the value and the distinctiveness of their culture but also its very existence. P. R. Stevenson, for example, whose 1956 book The Foundations of Culture in Australia is seen by many critics as a foundational text for Australian studies, although arguing that Australia is refracted by a particular cultural prism from elsewhere (England, America), spends a good deal of his opening chapter

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demonstrating that “We are not Americans” and refuting his contemporaries’ claim that Australia has no culture.20 His voice (although problematic) was an exception, one of a few voices dissenting from the majority of Australian literary scholars who shared University of Melbourne Professor Cowling’s opinion that, since there were no “ancient churches, castles, ruins—the memorials of generations departed,” Australian life was too lacking in depth to make first class art or to produce an independent identity. Cowling did not even entertain the idea of an Australian culture: for him literary culture was not indigenous but came from a European source.21 By the 1950s the climate had changed. A. D. Hope, one of Australia’s most distinguished poet-critics, in high Leavisite manner argued that Australian literature was in danger of prematurely declaring its “great tradition” and of being influenced by the market forces of mass-produced literature.22 To “rescue” it, “adequate organs of informed literary criticism” were needed which would be capable of recognizing “the work of genius...‘that surpasses the snow-line.’”23 “Literary standards,” he wrote, exhibiting his Arnoldian definition of “value,” “are established by two things: the existence of undoubted and enduring works of genius and the existence of a body of critical opinion which can only vaguely be defined as the ‘judgement of the best minds’ which in turn constitutes something equally hard to define, called the ‘level of taste.’”24 In Chapter Two I traced how this view of culture and value, formulated for English studies by Matthew Arnold and J. S. Mill, was the product of Classics and how its influence is still present today (not only in conservative arguments on literary value but also in the very methodology of criticism itself, including the radical kind). Since Australian critics including Hope come out of this tradition, it is not surprising that they follow its line of vision and fetishize the ancient at the expense of the modern (especially immigrant) Greeks. Nor is it surprising that they use the measure of “enduring genius” (set by Classics) to judge Australian literature which, with its “youth,” cannot compete with the greybeards of Europe (in particular, England).25 The large body of work, since Stephenson, Cowling and Hope, on Australian literature and its collection in such high profile

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anthologies as the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, the Penguin New Literary History of Australia, and the Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature has changed the landscape of Australian culture and its criticism. As the editors of a recent collection of essays on Australian culture have triumphantly announced: “the era of cultural cringe and cringers is long over...The struggle for us now centers firmly on what sort of culture we have. How to represent adequately the rich yet controversial sites of our culture.”26 Until recently, the representation of richness and complexity (often too strong for the Australian literary stomach) was the assigned role of Australia’s “ethnic” writers. In literary journals such as Outrider and publishing houses such as Phoenix and Dezsery, Australians of non-Anglo-Celtic descent or non-English-speaking backgrounds lived, wrote, and negotiated difference. With the establishment of multiculturalism as official state policy in the mid1970s, but especially with the widespread acceptance of its broader principle that all Australians should be free to express their cultural identity in the 1980s and 1990s, difference is now what all Australians have. Yet neither in the Australian Tourism Board’s successful marketing of Australia as the land of sun, sea, beer and barbecues (remembering Paul Hogan’s, a.k.a “Crocodile Dundee,” famous request of throwing another shrimp on the “barbie”); nor in Myths of Oz—one of the leading collections of Australian cultural studies in which ads like Hogan’s are read as part of Australian culture’s signifying practice—is there any reference to the everyday life practices of non-Anglo-Celtic Australians. If we are to believe the Tourism Board and the authors of Myths of Oz, Australian identity is made up of the pub, the beach, and “larrikinism.” That’s where its “difference” lies. Perhaps this is why Laurie Herghenhan, in the editor’s introduction to Penguin’s New Literary History of Australia, views some difference as more “original” than others. Much like the argument that circulates in ethnic studies in the USA—that the function of ethnic literature is to remind all Americans of their codes of initiation and entry—Herghenhan sees migrant writers as either reinforcing the familiar or as repeating the themes of the first Australian settlers. Consequently, a separate

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consideration and critique of minority literature is deemed redundant and tautological because the literature itself is seen as repetitious. Perhaps this is why the only reference to multicultural writers in the whole collection is in Bruce Bennett’s entry, “Perception, 1965-1988.” Even there, it is obvious that chronological necessity—or perhaps the need to confirm the state’s claim of multiculturalism post-1970s—forced him to mention three of the most well-known minority writers. Perhaps, also, because its eyes are still on the “mother” country (Britain) and the paternalistic USA, cultural studies in Australia, despite its break from the tradition of critics such as A. D. Hope and their focus on mass produced culture, does not address the literature of the people whose labor produces the commodities of that culture that they are so fond of enjoying “with a vengeance.”27 Meaghan Morris is one of its few practitioners to call for the consideration of non-Anglo-Celtic Australians’ practices of everyday life as part of the work of cultural studies. In her essay “On the Beach,” she criticizes Myths of Oz for its lack of politics in its reading of popular culture and argues that in view of Australian English departments’ and the Australia Council’s insistently economic representation of ‘culture,’ “it is one of the concerns of cultural studies to open up this field to the experiences, and the critical expressions of gender, race, and class.”28 She focuses on gender and class, but race and ethnicity don’t figure much in her work. In her reading of her “favorite ‘founding text’ for [her] own version of cultural studies”— Sylvia Lawson’s critical biography of a nineteenth-century populist magazine editor, The Archibald Paradox: A Case of Strange Authorship— she argues that she likes it because it shows that we are not presentist when we see “mixity” in 1890s Australia. For her its importance lies in the fact that it shows “that mixity was there, from the beginning.”29 While I agree with her theory of practice for Australian cultural studies in principle, I believe that her quick tendency to toe the line of government reports like Windows Onto Worlds’ argument that we were multicultural at the origin, while being critical of other such government reports, supports my point about the need to produce a genealogy of Australian cultural studies out of the multicultural context.

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Despite the lack of interest from the major publishing houses and the leading critics, the period between 1982 and 1992 saw the publication of ten general anthologies on Australian multicultural literature and just as many on specific minority groups’ literature.30 All of these texts follow Sneja Gunew’s definition of multicultural literature as comprised of the writings “of those groups, particularly in the wake of World War II, who deviate from the initial core groups of colonial settlers who came mainly from England and Ireland.”31 Unlike Herghenhan’s introduction, in which “multicultural” is identified as “ethnic” literature (with ethnicity being something that Anglo-Celtic writers don’t have), “multicultural” in all of these collections is identified as “migrant” literature. This reclassification is not without its problems. In their modern (because multiculturalist) attempt to avoid the archaism of ethnicity in classifying the literature produced by Australian writers of non-Anglo-Celtic background, these collections find themselves in the awkward situation of labeling second and third generation Australian writers as immigrants. Redundant if included in the canon of Australian literature, immigrant (hence “international”) if not, Australia’s “ethnic” literature is forever homeless. Constantly negotiating its terms of entry into the Australian national consciousness, it is, to paraphrase the words of Antigone Kefala, the only witness of itself. An Australian writer of Greek descent, she writes in her poem “Coming Home:” What if getting out of the bus in these abandoned suburbs pale under the street lights, what if, as we stepped down we forgot who we are became lost in this absence emptied of memory we, the only witness of ourselves before whom shall the drama be enacted?32

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Going against the grain of official Australian multicultural policy and its aim of displacing ethnicity/memory as a means of identifying the Australian character, Kefala’s poem is a nightmarish depiction of multiculturalism’s success: “absence/ emptied of memory.” Maintaining memory and being one’s own audience is the poet’s response to this hypothetical place of forgetfulness (“abandoned suburbs”). Rather than displacing ethnicity, which she depicts as the place where one keeps the memory of one’s past, Kefala offers it as a means through which the barren landscape of the multiculturalist version of the nation can be remapped. In the absence of memory, “before whom/shall the drama be enacted?” she asks. This is why “we, the only witness of ourselves” must continue to remember and enact our drama, even if it is for ourselves. Through this move, which is archaically nationalist in its autoscopic project of self-audience, the poem points to multicultural policy’s failure to produce new memories, new temporalizations of history.33 She also reminds us that despite modernity’s (in this instance, multiculturalism’s) claim to carry out a radical break with tradition, history does not begin entirely anew: the suburbs are not gone, they are only deserted. In my critique of the Australian state’s and its cultural practitioners’ adoption of multiculturalism, I do not want to be dismissive of the fact that its institution as state policy has produced a pluralist civic culture. What I hope I have pointed out, however, is the fact that this policy’s multilayered portrayal of the nation and its culture is still disingenuously hierarchical in its apparent plurality. The danger lies in the fact that only one group in society has access to the whole of the new plurality of national images. Beneath the pluralism “an old hierarchy finds new ways to sustain itself.”34 On Old Hierarchies

Dimitris Tsaloumas, winner of the 1983 Australian National Book Prize and one of the better known Greek-Australian writers, responded in the following manner to an interviewer’s question on how he felt about being an ethnic writer:

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I find the description ‘ethnic’ objectionable, silly and discriminatory. I suspect that this word was invented in order to eliminate the ambiguity inherent in the old term New Australian. The term ‘ethnic’ distinguishes between the classes of citizens in this country more clearly: it’s the Aborigines, Us, and the Wogs. In the popular mind at least, an ‘ethnic’ writer belongs in a cultural ghetto which is to be patronized, officially sanctioned, but not taken too seriously.35

Wanting no part in this, he rejects the sentimentality of writers who see “the poet as the voice of the migrant” and tells us that, in his own work, he feels “pity and sympathy towards my fellow man but ... my pity and sympathy embrace something larger than the workshop, the factory, and the fish-and-chips shop.” “Everything I write about,” he concludes, “ is connected with man and his wretched condition.”36 Whether they adopt such a high cultural approach or the low cultural thematics of the fish-and-chips shop, the primary concern for most writers of “ethnic” literature in Australia is one of inclusion. Literary critics of their work share their concern. Anxious to demonstrate the merit of ethnic literature as “great literature,” they have taken great pains to connect New Australian/ethnic /migrant/multicultural writing (to sketch the trans-formation of the classifications of minority literature) with older traditions of Australian literature. Con Castan, for example, committed to finding the continuities and not the ruptures in tradition, connects GreekAustralian literature with the nineteenth-century settler tradition.37 He argues that what he finds as this literature’s characteristic element—its dual consciousness—is also the principle at work in multicultural, specifically Greek-Australian, writing. Connecting the themes of nostalgia and the wonder of “discovery” abundant in the nineteenth-century colonialist settler texts with the Homeric topos, and both with early Greek-Australian writing, which was full of classical references in its account of the odyssey of migration, he argues for the latter’s double legitimacy. After all, it is a continuation not only of the “original” Australian literary tradition, “founded” by the nineteenth-century magazine the Bulletin’s circle of critics and evoked later by Australian populist poet-critics like Chris Wallace-Crabbe, but

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also a continuation of the “truly” original tradition of Classics.38 Manfred Jurgensen, the editor of Outrider, following the tradition of European primitivism, offers another site for the discovery of continuity. He sees a mythologizing of nature at work in the Australian literary and popular imagination, connects it to Aboriginal traditions, and suggests that this mythical response to nature is a characteristic of all Australian writing, including multicultural. For him, multiculturalism is “(Ab)original” and, as such, always already Australian.39 In the few instances where such a “continuist” approach has not been taken, the high cultural specter of aesthetic merit and “value” still haunts the debate. Angelo Loukakis, using the occasion of a reviewer’s “I am not moved to identify” response to his story collection Vernacular Dreams, addresses the Australian reading public’s attitude to multicultural writing with the following retort: “I just love that phrase. This is the fundamental bourgeois position—if only the world were full of people like me...This sort of reviewing is only too typical.”40 Yet, he proceeds to applaud the shift to the center of ethnic writing and sees it as evidence, “that in publishing at least people have seen the light...There is a recognition of the literary quality of some writers at work on material other than the migrant problem.”41 It appears that, despite his awareness of the problems of essentialism (whether that is the essentialism of the “I” of the bourgeois he ridicules or that of the writers of the “migrant problem) and his critique of the politics behind the dominant culture’s promotion of accounts that promote it, he nevertheless mobilizes a high cultural “sensibility” in his comment on literary quality. Sneja Gunew, a critic whose work was pioneering in its efforts to include non-Anglo-Celtic (especially women) writers in the discussions on national culture, also follows this pattern when she mobilizes poststructuralist and postcolonial theory to discuss multicultural literature. It is not only that she fails to remember Gayatri Spivak’s warning not to confuse stories of internal colonialism and those of the different ex-colonial societies. More importantly, as a leading voice in the field of multicultural studies, her forgetfulness sets the tone that other less committed critics follow in order to feel good that they have multicultural bones in their body. In

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a move that appears opposite—she focuses on ruptures—and is no less continuist than Castan’s and Jurgensen’s, she universalizes the very specific conditions of existence and circulation of the Australian multicultural literature that she fought so hard to distinguish. At the end of her very nuanced article in Striking Cords, for example, where she argues for the need for specificity, she nevertheless proceeds to offer Kefala’s poem “Coming Home” as an “excellent example of how the decentered self is already an intrinsic part of [the] marginal position [of “any cultural poesis”].”42 The particular history of Kefala’s decenterdness gets lost in the translation of her work as representative of all decenterdness. Kefala was born in Romania of Greek parents who were part of the diaspora that Greece did not accept prior to 1981, when the socialists who came to power allowed diasporic Greeks from communist countries to make the return without being jailed. Also, prior to moving to Australia in 1960 she lived in New Zealand. At the same time, the poem’s own resistance to such a totalizing historization, its narrator’s fear of “absence/emptied of memory,” is also overlooked. In Gunew’s reading, the specific position of the Greek-Australian writer—itself highly multiple—is articulated as part of the ensemble of cultural explanations that characterize the condition of modernity and becomes a general theory of the ethnic subject or the subject of ethnic studies in general. A poem by another Greek-Australian writer addresses the universalizing of the Greek by literary critics in a more direct way. It also offers a resolution to the tension between political and aesthetic representation as they are fought in the battleground of aesthetic merit and cultural inclusion by bringing them to the forefront. “Me I don’t exist,” says the narrator of a poem by Nikos Papastergiadis entitled “The New Language,” “I am a nothing/ Me I pack boxes/ All day I disappear.”43 “Me I don’t exist,” is a translation of the Greek “Εγω δεν υπαρχω.” “Ego don’t exist,” would be the translation of this translation. The “ego,” the personal pronoun of the Greek, is split and becomes the “Me I” of Greek-Australian English. Without a comma separating the “Me I,” the “Me” is not tonic, that is, correct colloquial English syntax. “Me I” also is neither “Me” nor “I,” neither the objective nor the subjective personal pronoun; rather it is both,

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the double “ego” of the Greek-Australian. “I don’t exist me” would be the correct English syntactic form. It does not make “proper” English sense, however. The object, “Me,” creates obstacles for the subject reading the statement. Without the “Me,” the statement could be read, in classic poststructuralist mode, as the subject’s paradoxical articulation of its status of non-existence (“I don’t exist”). The “Me,” however, by accentuating the subject’s object(ified) position, destroys the distance that informs readings such as this in which the Greek is left out, or rendered semi-literate, by the “professional jargon of the critic designed to maintain barriers between the practitioners of the discipline and the lay public.”44 Once again, as with Classics in the nineteenth-century, Greeks are a means through which careers are made. For the Philhellenist Europeans, Greece was their cultural capital, in whose currency— broken columns, history, language—they invested in order to get their returns, primarily their own cultural, political and economic interests.45 As we saw, in Chapter Two, with the Society of Dilettanti’s directive to its operatives to provide “useful” information to them, information that would help them with their trade in statues, the Europeans did not hide their economic interests. In the Appendix to his book, John Galt also mentions trade in the Levant as the reason for his and other Englishmen’s presence in Greece. Mary Shelley, meanwhile, honest about Europe’s passion for the Greeks, tells us that “their extensive commercial relations gave every European nation an interest in their [the Greeks’] success.”46 But, as Elli Skopetea shows, the capitalist interests of European colonialism in the Orient (the Suez Canal is an example) proved a far more preferable investment, and Philhellenism quickly disengaged itself from the option of modern Greek modernization and merely kept its symbolic allegiance to Hellenic antiquity.47 Australian multicultural critics interested in “broadening cultural concerns” are not so honest. They appropriate and capitalize on the immigrant experience and have a symbolic allegiance to its “monuments” (minority writing) without really addressing multiculturalism’s history in the political and economic arena. The Wakefield project, for example, and its contemporary manifestations in current immigration policy’s goal of attracting capital to Australia

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with the promise of cheap migrant labor is never considered as a factor in the politics of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism’s usefulness in the crisis management of capitalism is thus not addressed. Instead, like the much revered and highly influential in Australian English department up until the mid 1980s, and Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis before them, these critics divorce culture from social facts, link it with values and, with such a linkage, argue for culture’s ability to bring out our “best self.” Coming out of this cultural/historical context, it has not been difficult for the practice of multiculturalism to become the “common pursuit” of all who are interested in Australian culture. In her stubborn resistance to hiding her ethnicity, in her sly insertion of it within the boundaries of multiculturalist terms of representation, in her “broken” English, the speaker of Papastergiadis’ poem uses irony to undermine the critical construction and demand of her to always be authentic. As an example of what Homi Bhabha calls “sly civility,” the poem forces the reader to translate or “correct” “Me I don’t exist” into the equally “unintelligible” “I don’t exist Me” and, in so doing, places him in the position of the semi-literate other. “I don’t exist Me” might not make proper English sense, but it does make proper Greek sense—even though it is not correct Greek syntax. “I don’t exist Me” thus does not only register existential non-being: it is an accurate representation of the educational and, especially economic, position of most Greek immigrants in Australia. “I don’t have the means to exist myself,” that is, to make a living, the speaker is telling the reader: “I do not have the capital.” If I do not have the capital, why do you capitalize on “Me” by including the objective personal pronoun “Me” in a sentence where it is superfluous? I reject that, the subject “I” rejects that, demonstrating in its syntactical impropriety its inarticulacy for some, its refusal to hide the reinscription of the economic factor in the aesthetic for me. For it is my argument that one hears, in this inarticulacy—so often mistaken as part of the poem’s code of realism, as a demonstration, in other words, of the “authentic” migrant’s lack of education (in English)—the eloquent articulation of the subject’s oppression not only by the factory boss but also by the literary critic who gives it a subject position but only as the operating

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object of his or her cultural capital. This capital, as the Australian state’s multicultural policy and its (modest) funding of multicultural arts through the Australia Council indicates, has government guarantees. Papastergiadis’ semi-literate speaker’s refusal to hide the fact that the economic is the bottom line of multiculturalism makes it clear that her representation of her non-existence is not an allegory of transnational capital, as Fredric Jameson would argue, but a dramatic enactment for us (fellow immigrants and critics alike) of its failure. She uses this failure to speak out against multiculturalism and its practitioners—critics and policy makers —who are themselves products of capitalism and who, forgetting history, claim its success. Hers is a case of the kind of allegory that Spivak, differentiating it from Jameson’s usage of the term, tells us, “speaks out with the referential efficacy of a praxis.”48 Since we are “imprisoned in and habituated to capitalism,” she writes, explaining her sense of allegory, “we might try to look at the allegory of capitalism not in terms of capitalism as the source of authoritative reference, but in terms of the constant small failures in and interruptions to its logic, which help to recode it and produce our unity.” For Spivak, it is important that we literary critics learn and teach this praxis that “may produce interruptions to capitalism from within.”49 The only way we can do this is not simply by becoming experts in a field (we know the methodological and ideological history of that) but by becoming literate in the current transnational location of culture. Transnational literacy “produces the skill to differentiate between letters, so that an articulated script can be read, reread, written, rewritten.” It also “allows us to sense that the other is not just a ‘voice’” and that “others can also produce articulated texts, even as they, like us, are written in and by a text not of our own making.”50 An Allegorical Praxis

Illustrating their common genealogy in the circuit of AngloAmerican cultural studies, most cultural critics in their readings of popular culture make the same mistake as Fredric Jameson when he argues that, under multinational capitalism, “if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and...if a scientific or cognitive

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model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience.”51 Anxious to represent “authentic experience” and avoid the elitism of theory, these critics emphasize their and others’ enjoyment of popular culture by emphasizing, in mostly empirical studies, audience reception without reading the complicated ideological structures behind that reception. At the same time, they portray themselves as representing the “people” without addressing their class position as intellectuals.52 Or, despite the risk of being perceived as practicing a paternalist politics, they read cultural imperialism as an ideological property of the text itself, condemn it and the people who consume it as participating in “false consciousness,” and attempt to “speak for” the culture as a whole. John Fiske in Television Culture gives us a classic example of both sides of this equation and demonstrates, at the same time, the impossibility or the Eurocentric bias of either task. He writes: Cultural studies, in its current state of development, offers two overlapping methodological strategies that need to be combined, and the differences in them submerged, if we are to understand this cultural struggle. One derives from ethnography and requires us to study the meanings that the fans actually do (or appear to) make. This involves listening to them, reading the letters they write to fan magazines, or observing their behavior at home or in public. The fans’ words or behavior are not of course empirical facts that speak for themselves; they are, rather, texts that need ‘reading’ theoretically...The other strategy derives from semiotic and structuralist textual analysis. This strategy involves a close reading of signifiers of the text—that is, its physical presence—but recognizes that the signifieds exist not in the text itself, but extratextually, in the myths, countermyths, and ideology of their culture.53

Virginia Nightingale has written quite eloquently on the impossibility of this project, especially its ethnographic part. She demonstrates how Fiske’s apparently simple formula of “using semiotics to study texts and ethnography to study audiences depends

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for its coherence on a refusal to acknowledge the theoretical and methodological inadequacies inherent in the enterprise.”54 Graeme Turner, in an essay that critiques the parochialism of British cultural studies and the colonial genuflecting of some of its Australian practitioners, demonstrates the Eurocentrism: British cultural studies [he writes] speaks unapologetically from the centers of Britain and Europe, both of them locations where the perspective from the margins is rarely considered. Indeed, Eurocentrism has lately begun to deny itself in a novel way, bidding for the ideological purity that comes with subordination, marginalization, without, of course, needing to accept the powerlessness that denies the genuinely subordinated any satisfaction in such a position.55

That his own work, in Myths of Oz, for example, does not acknowledge that there is a marginal perspective to what he reads as the marginal culture of Australia functions as proof of the need for Australian cultural studies to situate itself genealogically with multiculturalism. This is the methodological context, the literacy (in the sense of specialty) most obviously available to me when I want to write about popular culture, in this instance, my experience of watching “I Dream of Jeannie” as an eight year old Greek girl, recently migrated to Australia.56 My choice of ending this chapter with a reading of a highly popular mass-cultural text (it is still in re-reruns thirty years later) is not just a reflection of the rise of the popular among academic circles, an effect of what one critic calls “probably the most wide-ranging [of] transformations of the humanities since literary criticism’s rise to power over half a century ago.”57 It is mostly an attempt to intervene allegorically in current discussions on the use of mass media in identity formation and to find a place for the pleasure and the use I had (and still have) in watching “I Dream of Jeannie.” I am neither the “duped” and uncritical consumer of the cultural imperialism of the USA (also of Anglo-Australia) that some of these readings would have me be, nor, because of my training, the literate and savvy producer of politico-theoretical

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critiques of such consumption which, by necessity, because of their theoretical distance, are not “authentic.” “I Dream of Jeannie” was not only the place where I saw my otherness in the form of the exoticized djinni but also the place where I saw that otherness as empowering. It not only inducted me into the dominant culture, it was also the means through which I maintained my otherness by “blinking” a passage home, however fleeting and imaginary. Such a double use and a double pleasure, with all its contradictions, cannot be accounted for in the practices of Anglo-American cultural studies that would have me explore my pleasure in the popular through what Kobena Mercer calls “the alltoo-familiar mantra of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality.”58 In focusing on any one of these, I would have to negate at least one of my double identities. My class status, for example, changes according to which country I live in and how my identity is read there: in Greece I am part of the petit bourgeoisie, in Australia, as an immigrant, I am (and generally seen as) working class, while in the USA, because of my academic credentials I am seen as upper middle class or part of the intellectual elite. A postcolonial and/or a multicultural critique, on the other hand, would read my pleasure in watching “Jeannie” as a product of the imperial dominance of the single integrated market dominated by the USA and have me, as a person of the diaspora, be the victim of this globality. The fact that “Jeannie” functioned as a school of English and a lesson in “home” building for me is not taken into account in this equation. Lost in the interstices of the global cultural and economic networks, more acutely felt because of my migration to Australia, my experience of the present (then Australian reality) was hampered by the nostalgic return to another more “authentic” present—Greece and its memory of psychological, cultural, and experiential unity. In the abstract space framed by the television set, my window to the world, and its timeless, because foreign, context of 1960s American popular culture, I forgot the foreignness of my present Australian culture and dreamed of the lost past and its recapture in the utopian future. My experience of “I Dream of Jeannie” could be seen as a perfect example of Fredric Jameson’s argument that “the truth of experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place”

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but is spread-eagled across the world’s spaces.59 For Jameson, in the saturated space of multinational capitalism, place no longer exists except at a “much feebler level,” drowned by the other, more powerful abstract spaces of communications networks. Watching the show was a sign of abstraction for me. Despite my desire to return to Greece, my sense of place was indeed drowned by the more powerful abstract space of the communication network. The Greece that I dreamed of was neither the one I had left behind nor the one that developed in my absence; it was, instead, the abstract place of my imagination. Mediated by my vicarious life of “Jeannie,” it was an imaginary place, one in which the reasons for my departure did not exist. Politics and economics, in other words, had no place in that magical kingdom, nor did the pain of migration. Watching the show, however, was also a sign of distraction. Alienated by my Australian reality, I turned to “I Dream of Jeannie” and transformed the abstract space of the communication network into the place of my lived experience. In Jeannie’s foreignness I saw mine, in her limited world of the bottle I saw my limited world of the Greek-Australian community, and in her constant efforts to hide her otherness I saw my constant battle to fit in. Thus, unlike Jameson’s singular and negative reading of the power of communication networks, the show functioned as both a “feeble” and a strong marker of place for me. “Feeble” when that place was the Greece of my imagination, strong when that place was the Australia of my then everyday life. I watched the show in 1970s Australia, a time of political upheaval that led to changes in government and its policies towards immigration, the economy, culture, and the media. For example, 1972 saw the fall of the very popular Whitlam Labor government through an act that reminded Australians of the sovereignty of the queen: her representative, the Governor General, fired Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. His was a government that immigrants felt was sympathetic and helpful to them. In one of its last pieces of legislation, it introduced the multicultural Australia policy to replace the assimilationist policies of the past. For ethnic Australia that meant that, through the establishment of the Department of

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Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, they could lobby for legislation more sensitive to their needs, they could get funding for their various organizations, and their different cultural and ethnic backgrounds could, on paper at least, be celebrated as contributing to the mosaic of Australian culture. The early 1970s also saw the end of the post-World-War-II policy of mass immigration and the introduction of smaller scale and more specialized immigration: family reunions and, most importantly, the encouragement and continuation of capital import driven immigration. Part of this later policy was the encouragement of overseas investment in the Australian film industry, an encouragement which, together with generous government investment in the form of grants and tax breaks, led to the industry’s revival.60 All of these changes had a huge impact on the up till then quite insular and isolated Australian reality: Australians began to think not only of the identities of their immigrants but also of their own. Indicative of its time, the inspiration for the founding of an Australian film industry was the desire to have a cinema that could speak of the national and the local, to have films in which, in the words of an early industry campaigner, “the workaday world is integrated with the world of one’s imagination.”61 Thus from the outset the industry was heavily protected by the government in the form of subsidies and legislation that mandated the presence of minimum Australian content in foreign co-produced films and television programs, Australian themes in Australian films, and the use of Australian crew members and actors in the films’ production. The government also established various agencies to police these mandates: the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, the Australian Film Commission, and the Australian Council for the Arts. In 1969, in an Interim Report, the Film Committee of the Australian Council for the Arts, already feeling the pressure of Jameson’s abstract spaces and betraying the nationalism that characterizes Australian cultural policy of the time, wrote the following about the role of film and television in the lives of the nation and the government’s responsibility to both:

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it is in the interests of this nation to encourage its local film and television industry so as to increase the quantity and improve the quality of local material in our cinema and on our television screens...our audiences are subjected to the ever-increasing sociological influence of imported material, and our writers, actors and film-makers are unable to fulfil their creative potential...this situation hampers Australia’s efforts to interpret itself to the rest of the world.

Continuing in this tradition, the Australian Film Commission wrote in 1975: Australia, as a nation, cannot accept, in this powerful and persuasivemedium, the current flood of other nations’ production on our screens without it constituting a very serious threat to our national identity.

In 1977 the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal wrote:

An Australian television service which looks unmistakenly Australian has long been regarded as a highly desirable ideal.62

Clearly, the discourse underlying these official positions is, as Elizabeth Jacka has argued, nationalist in its protectionism.63 I would add: and nationalist in its construction of Australianness. As I found out at the age of eight, protection from foreignness did not apply only to the threat posed by mostly American cultural practices and products. (English cultural imports were not seen as foreign at the time since England was and, for a great many Australians, still is considered the “mother country.”) Foreignness was also what all immigrants carried with them, despite the fact that a substantial number are second and third generation Australians. Thus there were no Greek-speaking or immigrant theme shows on television and, if there was any portrayal of immigrants, it was generally as uneducated, backward, the colorful comic relief to authentic Australians like those portrayed in shows like the cop show Division 4 and the more risqué (because of its adult theme) Number 96 (both

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on television in the 1970s). It was only much later (in the 1980s) that the government founded SBS (Special Broadcasting System), although it gave it a miniscule budget compared to the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Available to seventy five per cent of the population, SBS broadcasts programs from the countries of origin of all of Australia’s multicultural community and, at the same time, produces original Australian made shows (news and entertainment) with a multicultural theme. Recently, however, reflecting, as I mentioned earlier, the trend of intolerance, and the argument that it did its work hence we don’t need to spend muchneeded resources on something that is redundant, the government slashed that original miniscule budget by half. Against this background, then, I watched “I Dream of Jeannie.” None of the shows on television reflected my Australian reality, and the Australia that they did represent was the one that hurt me: I regularly returned home from school with cuts and bruises, the unwanted trophies of schoolyard scuffles with my name-calling Australian tormentors. Apart from the physical bruising, there was the psychological trauma of muteness: I left Greece a very articulate child and a good student and became in Australia the frustrated and silent non-English-speaking student. Thus the foreign—initially I did not even register the fact that it was American—and exotic—yet familiar from fairy tales—show about a genie was the one that I could not help but identify with: it spoke to my reality of being both foreign and exotic. It alone reflected my desire to vanish and be somewhere else. I watched every episode of “I Dream of Jeannie.” Mine was a wholesale acceptance of the show: no discernment there. Individual shows had no lasting effect: it was the constant reminder of the power of her magic that I was after. Her magic was the source of my fascination and my constant fantasies of displacement. My favorite, and the most baffling episode, however, was one that involved her brunette—and hence evil—twin sister. In it, the sister, jealous of Jeannie’s fortune in having such a handsome master and living in 1960s Coco Beach, manages to dupe Jeannie into switching places and masters with her. The forever-gullible Jeannie falls for the trick and finds herself trapped in Baghdad with an old master, archaic in

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his cruel ways. Initially, Major Nelson cannot tell the difference between the sisters, especially since the brunette turned herself into a blonde. After she ends up being too obvious in her advances towards him, however, he realizes that some blondes are more authentic than others: this blonde is not his servile Jeannie but a woman who knows what she wants—him. He refuses her advances; she gets angry and blinks him to Baghdad. A bewildered Major Nelson finds himself in a Baghdad that is timeless: the bazaar with its peddlers and thieves, errant street urchins and cruel emissaries of the emir, all in “ancient costume.” What a difference from NASA headquarters and sixties Coco beach! It is here, however, that he manages to find Jeannie, rescue her—and thus himself—and go back home to oust the evil impostor. When I first saw this episode I certainly didn’t see the sexism, orientalism, and imperialism at work in it. I didn’t see the problem of having two very powerful, but literally “old fashioned,” women fight over the favors of a man who didn’t really respect them and who certainly used them, however bumblingly, as a means of shoring up his manhood. I didn’t see the strangeness in having Baghdad be timeless, forever ancient, and the United States be the mark of modernity. I also didn’t see the problem with having Major Nelson teach both women how to behave, how to learn American ways, how to forget their cultures, and how to stand up for themselves (on his terms, of course). Instead, true to my highly patriarchal and bourgeois imitating good-Greek-girl upbringing, my anger was directed at the evil sister who fooled poor Jeannie and her master and took something that was not hers. I felt gratified when she was put in her place, sent where she belonged, Baghdad, where masters were masters and djinn knew their place. Apart from this moral, there was another lesson for me in this show, one that didn’t play itself out in the field of plot convention and the creation of suspense and resolution in the space of a half hour television show. Jeannie’s unwilling return to Baghdad represented the fear that most immigrants have of being sent “back to where they come from.” It was a common taunt, one that I heard every day in the schoolyard, and one that left a lasting impression on me: “wogs go home.” Could I be forced into going back home?

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Wasn’t going home all I wanted, which is why I imagined that I was Jeannie and could blink my way home to continue the life I left behind? My mixed feelings and the contradictory nature of this return was what helped me assimilate into the culture of my new home. I wanted to go back to Greece not as the ousted or failed immigrant, but as the triumphant Odysseus coming back from his journey. My dreams of being Jeannie always involved showing off my newfound modernity to the people I left behind, stuck in their “archaic” time. I had all the accoutrements of a growing capitalist economy: color television, modern clothes, a new language and multiple stories of places and things that I had seen. My family and friends in Greece, on the other hand, could only show me what I already knew: my place. Thus I, like Jeannie, was trapped in the bottle of time. Like hers, my place was the world of arabesques: the fake and orientalist interior of her bottle for her, the petrified time of departure from Greece for me. To both of these places she and I staged a continuous return, only to turn back, dissatisfied with our old selves. After living with Major Nelson, the show implied, Jeannie couldn’t be happy with her old-fashioned master. After Australia, I couldn’t be happy with Greece. And yet that’s what I wanted. Like Jeannie’s, my “bottle” was always left open: I could come and go as I pleased (after the obligatory two year stay mandated by the Australian government that paid for our passage). I could be as Australian as the rest; in fact, it was expected that I assimilate. Yet why, like her, did I not choose to live outside my “bottle” in the comfort of my new modern life? I fear that it was because, like her, I always bore the mark of difference in my ways. I wasn’t in projected or real ethnic costume like Jeannie, but I might as well have been, since I will always be “ethnic” in Australia. It would seem that the less enlightened and not multicultural past is behind us now. Yet, we saw earlier in this chapter, as recently as 1987, the Committee to Review Australian Studies at the Tertiary Level issued a report whose purpose was to “enhance citizenship, patriotism and nationalism; secure a productive culture; increase international awareness; bring intellectual enrichment and lead to

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cultural broadening,” placed “understanding and studying the cultures from which all and not only Anglo-Celtic Australians come from” under the goal of “increasing international awareness” and not under “enhancing citizenship.” It seems that, for Australia, naturalized Australian citizens like myself will always be foreign: foreign enough for “fair dinkum Aussies” to mutter “bloody wogs” whenever, through our different expressions of culture, we try to increase even their “international” awareness. Jeannie’s evil twin sister presented me with another problem: was I, like her, being evil in wanting to assimilate, in wanting to be modern, in throwing off the shackles of a more traditional family and embracing the role of the independent young woman who knows what she wants? Would the past—in the form of her old master in Jeannie’s sister’s case and Greece and my family in mine— draw me back and leave me nostalgic for my newfound ways? Was I not already nostalgic for precisely that past when I imagined I could blink myself back from my Australian reality? Trapped in this double nostalgia, all I could do was to trick both sides into believing in my “authenticity.” Unlike Jeannie’s sister, I did not dye my hair blonde, although I did what all blonde Australian kids did: I played cricket, watched football, ate meat pies, wore the same clothes, and developed the typical Australian attitude of nonchalance when being praised for doing well in school—I didn’t want to “shine” in difference.64 Meanwhile, I also had to be the good Greek girl: I went to (Greek government funded) Saturday morning community Greek school so I wouldn’t forget the Greek language and customs, and, above all, I tried harder than anyone at my “regular” school to show those Australians who made fun of immigrants like myself that I wasn’t just a “dumb wog.” Thus, unlike Jeannie’s sister, I wasn’t found out, I wasn’t sent back home in disgrace, and I certainly could not be labelled “bad.” I was the best impostor of them all. “I Dream of Jeannie” taught me dissimulation: like her, I could pass as an “ordinary” Aussie because, like her, I could change my exotic ways with the blink of an eye.65 It was that very same blink that also made me exotic at home in Greece. In my dreams of return I regaled my friends and family with the stories of my new home and, like Jeannie, I was always generous with my powers: I shared my

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knowledge of the new world, I gave them all that they wanted, literally lacked—TVs, new clothes, music, and all the products of the “lucky country” (the name given by both critics and “ordinary people” to Australia). No wonder I took such delight in the show: it confirmed both the reality that I was experiencing and the reality that I wished for, and, along the way, it also taught me some survival tips. Today I struggle to maintain the specificity of my story and to make sense of the forces that make that story not only peculiar to me but also the story of anyone living in the age of multinational capital. It is difficult. Insofar as I am constantly read as “cosmopolitan,” my specialty as a critic working on postcolonialism often used as proof of this cosmopolitanism and my dislocated existence as further proof, there seems to be no place where the “truth” of my story and the “truth” of my theoretical expertise can meet. If Jameson is right and individual experience and cognitive models cancel out each other’s truth, then my struggle is essentially quixotic. I will have to choose between my personal experience as a child of eight watching “Jeannie” and my exploration of the methodological and historical context of my viewing of the show. My intention in this account was neither to add to the work that I have already done in my specialty nor to write as an innocent-fromtheory consumer. Neither this account nor my then eight-year-old viewing self are free of critical consciousness. To map out the difference between these two moments in my life as a viewer was also not my intention: this is not a memoir. I loved watching “Jeannie” then and I love it now. “Jeannie” was a useful tool for survival in my new home of Australia. Living in the interstices of the dominant culture, I used “Jeannie” as a means of maintaining my identity and my difference. I watch the show now, not in the campy or retro way of most of my friends (academic and not) and—I suspect—most of the viewing public, nor in the ethnographic or semiotic way that Fiske offers as the methodologies of cultural studies. Instead, I watch it with the fondness and familiarity that one has when one finds a favorite old toy. After all, the show created a place for me to make sense of such an abstract, to me, space as “Australia.”

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To the dehistoricizing vacuum of activities like cultural theory, the show helps me to rehistoricize my experience of theoretically abstracted concepts like “identity,” “nation,” “home.” At the same time, as I have argued, those abstracted concepts were understood as such only through my experience of their very real implications: home was not something I questioned until I was forced to think about what “wogs go home” meant, identity was not an issue until I saw that mine was recognised as foreign. “I Dream of Jeannie,” then, far from diminishing my sense of place in the abstract space occupied by communication networks, became the tool through which I could occupy that space and turn it into the place of my lived experience. Postmodern theory would call this practice the effect of the simulacrum that is today’s experience of the real. My training in postcolonial theory—and its criticism of postmodernism’s culturally insular announcement of the death of the subject and the birth of ahistorical fragments of discourse—halts this prematurely euphoric celebration of the subject’s freedom. At the risk of being accused of naïveté at best, modernist belatedness at worst, my turning on/off (being) Jeannie was and is not an ahistorical and fragmented practice. As I have shown in my account of my viewing of the show, it is a practice very much rooted in the “national, the global, and the historical, as well as the contemporary diasporic” that make up the story of the development of my cosmopolitanism—the cosmopolitanism, that is, of the migrant and not the tourist. As such, it is not the temporary and self-indulgent visit to other places and other times of the postmodern subject, but the always never-quitepermanent stay of the “guest worker,” the immigrant. “Jeannie” for me represents not the souvenir or the postcard from a temporary visit, but the temporary and hastily built house of anyone who is in transit. In representing the temporary, “Jeannie” retains its initial function: it still is the means through which I can blink my way home, in this last instance, through personally theoretical narratives like this. The show represents my “as if ” self, my ability to transport myself to a better place, a place that is both familiar and foreign and where I am neither ethnic nor national.

CONCLUSION

No culture presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular.

--Derrida1

In 1822 it was possible for Percy Shelley to declare in his famous Preface to “Hellas” that we were all Greeks. Greece, even though it did not yet exist as a political institution, was at that time a ubiquitous cultural artifact.2 Concern with its reinstitution reflected Europe’s concern with its own contemporary necessities. Contemporary necessities, however, change. If in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century Greece provided the style through which European states imagined their national communities, what is its role today when “the owl of Minerva which brings wisdom” is “circling around nations and nationalism” and a large part of world culture is contemplating itself in openly transnational terms?3 This is the one of the questions addressed in this book. Global migration has changed the circumstances of the nation-state. Its sovereignty and the assumed unity of the national culture are fundamentally disturbed when uneven and unequal global and transnational flows blur the lines between majority and minority. As Arjun Appadurai writes, helping Benedict Anderson acknowledge that his initial theorization of imagined communities was “short-sighted:”4

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the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular....on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures.5

Out of this disjunctive dynamic the West has launched a dramatic philosophical self-dissolution in the name of epistemic decolonization. The results of this cultural divestment, as I indicated in the introduction of this book, are found in the rise of critical “posts” and celebrated as the investment in the discourse of otherness that offers us a new vision of the future. In exploring the role of Greece in this “new” terrain, I am not automatically attaching it to what one of the leading theorists of “hybridity” has quite accurately called “the jargon of the minorities,” or, as he explains, “the prodigious production of discourses of ‘othering’ that, in their turn, have given rise to formulations of affiliative alterity.”6 But I also do not automatically exclude Greece from this discourse because of the history of its use in the production of Western identities or because of its own post-1830 history of producing itself as Other.7 Rather, aware that essentialisms—of identity or alterity— inevitably end up as a mainstay of the status quo and believing that what is of political and cultural significance is not what one is, but what one does (or what is done in one’s name), this book explored the currency of the term “Greek” in literary and critical negotiations of identity between nationalism (uni- or multicultural) and globality. My inquiry might appear as another—the newest—of the questions that we have been asking Greece, while my use of the personal might be seen as an argument (an essentialist one at that) for further proof that it is the yardstick against which we measure our own selfknowledge. After all, this is the danger—of complicity—that accompanies any interrogation of identity in the name of difference. Out of this complicity, however, emerges an urgent pedagogical task:

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to undo continually (but provisionally) “oppositions between secular and non-secular, national and subaltern, national and international, cultural and socio/political by teasing out their complicity” and by putting the economic “under erasure,” that is, seeing it as “irreducible as it reinscribes the social text.”8

NOTES

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4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11

12 13

Introduction

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 250. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 4 Among these are: Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (March/April 1984), pp. 96-113 and Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984), pp. 53-92 and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002). This question plagues every claim of newness, including Marxism’s own. Marxist definitions of modernity are themselves not immune to criticism, the most relevant being that they neglect problems in the philosophy of history. “Postmodernism, one might say,” as Peter Osborne suggests, “is the revenge of the philosophical discourse of modernity upon Marxism for neglecting problems in the philosophy of history,” in The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), p. ix. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 116. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 116. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 64. Bhabha’s, and postcolonial criticism’s, project as stated in Bhabha’s book with this title. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 253. Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), p. 226. Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 224. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 250. Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell (London: Faber, 1997), p. 131. First published 1945.

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14 Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” Collected Papers Vol.5., trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), p. 304 15 Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” p. 304. 16 Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” p. 304. 17 Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” p. 307. 18 See David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13/1-2 (1991), p. 63. 19 Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996); Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism; Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 20 Both Edward Said in Orientalism (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1978) and Martin Bernal in Black Athena Vol. 1 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) document the role of philology and its affiliated discipline of Classics in producing Hellenism and in so doing building the structural makeup of Western culture. 21 There are many studies that trace the role of Classics in the rise of English studies. See Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1842-1942 (London: Blackwell, 1988) and the essays in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 22 Andrew Ross in “Defenders of the Faith and the New Class” argues for this “common ground” and asks those of us who are interested in changing the times to use it as the stepping stone “from which to contest the existing definitions of a popular-democratic culture,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., Intellectuals, Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 129. For an account of how nineteenth-century cultural projects are unwittingly mirrored in contemporary radical critical positions see my “Multinationalism or Multiculturalism?” in David Bennett, ed., Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 69-87. 23 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 46. 24 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 6. Jameson’s essay (and the subsequent eponymous book that contains it, and from which my references are drawn) has come under much critical discussion ranging from attack, like Aijaz Ahmad’s in his book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), to friendly criticism like Gayatri Spivak’s in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) where she writes: “Transnational literacy keeps the abstract as such, the economic, visible under erasure. Yet it cannot afford to ignore the irreducible heterogeneity of the cultural in the name of the ‘cultural dominant’ simply because it is dominant,” p. 315.

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25 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: The Book League of America, 1929). First published in 1869. 26 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 313-320. 27 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 6; Michael Herzfeld, “The Absent Presence: Discourse of Crypto-colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101/4 (Fall 2002), pp. 900-901. 28 Jusdanis, in Belated Modernity, introduces the concept of “belated modernity” and, unlike most modern Greek scholars (social and political theorists like Nicos Mouzelis, Constantinos Tsoucalas, Kostas Vergopoulos) who use a Marxist understanding of modernity and modernization, he traces the problematic modernization of Greece to its peculiar development of aesthetic culture. Yet, as Gourgouris points out, Jusdanis’ “analysis is compromised by a rather Habermasian insistence that culture is a voluntarist formation,” Dream Nation, pp. 71-72. 29 Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 281. 30 In Mouzelis’ analysis, Greece is marked by a procession of “underdevelopments”— from the initial inheritance of an already dismantled Ottoman agrarian economy due to the expansion of European merchant capital, to the subsequent annihilation of the Balkan cottage industry due to the Industrial Revolution, to the post-1850 colonialist expansion of capital and exploitation of the periphery, and finally to the present state of late capitalism in peripheral societies, namely, the imposed disjunction between production for the needs of foreign capital and a weak internal economy one of whose by-products is mass immigration. Nikos Mouzelis, Facets of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 28-29. 31 Mouzelis, Facets of Underdevelopment, p. 138. 32 Mouzelis, Facets of Underdevelopment, p.154. 33 Mouzelis, Facets of Underdevelopment, pp. 178-179. 34 See Gourgouris, Dream Nation, pp. 64-71 for a good account of Mouzelis’ work in the context of his Althusserian heritage and in the context of the Greek Enlightenment. 35 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 46. 36 It is important to note that my account of Greece’s interstitial position between East and West, tradition and modernity, civilization and barbarism, although structurally occupying a similar position to postcolonial interrogations of modernity, does not in any way equate the stories of the colonial encounter and their displaced repetition in the postcolonial with the story of the West’s encounter and construction of Greece. Such an equation would read only the enunciative present of the sign of modernity and not also its material processes of socialization that, though coded, cannot be reduced to the temporal logic of the sign. 37 See Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel: Postmodern Theories of Displacement

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38 39 40

41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

THE GREEK IDEA (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) in which she argues that “thinking about location as an ‘axis’ rather than a place helps us imagine the contradictory and complex workings of subject formation in postmodernity,” pp.183-84. See also Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7/2 (1993), pp. 292-310; Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2/2 (Spring 1990), pp. 1-24; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,” Copyright 1 (Fall 1987), pp. 30-44; and Ania Loomba, “Overworlding the ‘Third World,’” Oxford Literary Review 13/1-2 (1991), pp. 164-191 for some representative discussions on the politics of location. Kaplan, The Politics of Location, p. 162. Kaplan, The Politics of Location, p.187. Ian Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 104. This is a point that is also made by Kaplan, especially in the first two chapters of Questions of Travel, in which she traces modernist and postmodernist formations of displacement. For an account of the residues in multiculturalism of Arnold’s Hellenized culture, which he saw as the safeguard of the social and moral and the blueprint of the national order, see my “Multiculturalism or Multinationalism?” in Bennett, Multicultural States. Spivak has argued how, in Euro-American criticism, this erases the ideological position of the critic. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanism,” Social Text 31/32 (1992), p. 173. Ahmad, In Theory, p. 85. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, R.D. Hicks, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 63 (my translation). For an excellent history of the birth and subsequent life of this conceptual pair, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 165-173. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 245. See Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities,” which are “to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p.15. “New Australian” was a term initially used in the fifties to describe the mostly southern European influx of immigrants to Australia. Their

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“newness” was less an indication of their status as the latest immigrants—Britons were migrating to Australia then. 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8

Chapter One

The history of the figure of the Sphinx is traced in Pierre Grimal, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1991). First published in France in 1951. As his sources to his entry on the Sphinx Grimal cites Hesiod, Theogony 326, Appolodorus, Biblioteca 3, 5, 8; Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 391; Euripides, Phoenician Women, 45; Diodorus Siculus, 4, 63; Pausanias, IX, 26, 3-5; Hyginus, Fabulae, 67; Seneca, Oedipus, 92; Athenaeus, 10, 456; Tzetzes, Alexander, 7. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Belknap Series, 1996), p. 267. Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1, p. 267. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, pp. 226-227. This opposition between the rational and the mythical has ancient roots. As Jean-Pierre Vernant explains in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (London: Methuen, 1982), pp.186-187: The concept of myth that we have inherited from the Greeks belongs, by reason of its origins and history, to a tradition of thought peculiar to Western civilization in which myth is defined in terms of what is not myth, being opposed to reality (myth is fiction) and, secondly, to what is rational (myth is absurd)....the concept of myth peculiar to classical antiquity thus became clearly defined through the setting up of an opposition between mythos and logos, henceforth seen as separate and contrasting terms.

Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 253, 254. Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 14. 9 Marina Warner, Managing Monsters, p. 14 10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). First published in 1976. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1972). First published in France in 1957. 11 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (1986), pp. 65-88. 12 Warner, Managing Monsters, p. 8.

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13 Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. I, p. 267. 14 Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. I, p. 268. 15 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books 1990), p. 138. See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology and Henri Lefebvre’s section “Oedipus” in Introduction to Modernity. 16 Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W.H.S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1969), IX 26, pp. 3-5. 17 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (Athens: Greek Government Education Editions, 1981). My translation. 18 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 227. 19 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 3. 20 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. 21 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. 22 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), p. 97. 23 Chapter Two explores and offers examples of this rediscovery of Greece. For good representative accounts of the rediscovery of Hellenism in eighteenth-century England see also G. W. Clarke, ed., Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24 Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Higher Education (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), Postscript. 25 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 201. 26 Michel de Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 90-91. 27 Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 213. 28 An exception here would be Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in which she alerts her readers to postcolonial criticism’s embeddedness with the discourse of the West. 29 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 253. 30 I am using “Cultural Studies” in the way Fredric Jameson reads it as a particular desire. He approaches it politically and socially as the desire to constitute a “historic bloc.” Fredric Jameson “On Cultural Studies,” John Rajchman, ed. The Identity in Question (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 251. 31 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. 32 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. 33 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 228. 34 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. 35 Michel Foucault, “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” trans. Colin Gordon. Economy and Society 15/1 (February 1986), p. 95.

NOTES

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38 39 40

41

42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

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Derrida’s “White Mythology,” as also Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, both address the suppression of the historicity of the universal. An excellent essay on precisely this topic is Sanjay Seth’s “Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?” Social Text 78 (Spring 2004), pp. 85-101. The central pieces in that project are: Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991) and Critique of Everyday Life Vol.II, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002). See also his The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Blackwell, 1991). See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time, for an account of Lefebvre’s work on alienation and the everyday. “In thus concretizing the concept of alienation,” he writes, “he [Lefebvre] simultaneously prepared the ground for what we now call ‘cultural studies’, as a sociology of the everyday, and anticipated the New Left’s attempt to expand the definition of socialism beyond political economy to encompass the totality of human relations,” p. 190. The everyday, Osborne explains, plays a part in Lefebvre’s work similar to that played by culture in Raymond Williams’, p. 191. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I, p. 97. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I, p. 76. Not all cultural studies critics agree on how to read Lefebvre’s concept of the everyday. For an account of the different reactions to his work see Michael Gardiner, “Everyday utopianism: Lefebvre and his Critics,” Cultural Studies18/2-3 (March/May 2004), pp. 228-254. The whole issue of Cultural Studies in which Gardiner’s essay is dedicated to Lefebvre and his concept of the everyday. This is contrary to John Frow’s reading of Lefebvre’s project as allegorical because, he argues, it expresses nostalgia for the lost unity of premodern society, a desire that is projected to a utopian future. John Frow, “’Never draw to an inside straight:’ on everyday knowledge,” New Literary History 33 (2002), pp. 623-637. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, pp. 227-228. The term “alienation” is not found as much in Marx’s later work, but it is wrong to assume that he abandoned the idea: it informs his later writings, especially Das Kapital, in the notion of “fetishism of commodities.” Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, E. Kofman and E. Lebas, eds. (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 109. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 326. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 327. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 226. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 224. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 225. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 330.

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51 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, p. 326. 52 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 250. 53 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 278-279. 54 de Certeau, “The Historiographical Question,” p. 91. 55 de Certeau, “The Historiographical Question,” p. 91 56 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 281. 57 For a very negative account of how these two different positions (Foucauldian methodology and Auerbachian humanism) manifest themselves in Said’s work see Aijaz Ahmad’s “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said” in his In Theory, pp. 159-219. Although Ahmad’s critique is harsh—it received a vociferous critical response in Public Culture 6/1 (1993)—it provides a useful reminder of the importance of class in race, ethnicity and culture studies which tend to aestheticize displacement. One can say that for a diasporic cosmopolitan intellectual schooled in the same elite Euro-American institutions as his critics, Said cannot help but write criticism that can only reflect the tensions and complexities of this social history. This really is the argument that Aamir Mufti also comes to, even though he criticizes Ahmad for misreading Said’s use of Auerbach. Aamir Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998), pp. 95-125. 58 Said, Orientalism, p. 56. 59 Said, Orientalism, p. 57. 60 Said, Orientalism, p. 2. 61 Said, Orientalism, pp. 2-3. 62 Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 63 Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 64 Said, Orientalism, p. 120, 122. 65 For England’s and the other “Great Powers’” influence and “protection” of Greece during the “Eastern Question,” the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, see Richard Millman, Britain and the Eastern Question (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 66 “If the story of India,” he writes, “is the paradigmatic condition of the colonialist imaginary, then the story of Greece is the paradigmatic colonialist condition in the imaginary.” “These two stories have a common history,” he continues, “the refracted history of ‘Europe,’” Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 6. 67 Said, Orientalism, p. 56, 57, 57. 68 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 71. 69 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 256. 70 See Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 266. Among these theorists are:

NOTES

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75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

85

86 87

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Blumenberg, Legitimacy of Modern Age, Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, and Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 238-241. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 246. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 233. Henri Meschonic, “Modernity, Modernity,” New Literary History 23 (1992), p. 419. Meschonic, “Modernity, Modernity,” p. 419. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 257. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 240. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 240. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 241. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 243, 247. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 242. Gyan Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 496. Prakash, “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” p. 496. Describing the shift from the old to the new, secular, philology (roughly the period from 1780 to the mid-1830s) that shows the new disciplinary ideal and indicating its relation to anthropology, Edward Said writes: “there are now families of languages (the analogy with species and anatomical classification is marked), there is perfect linguistic form, which need not correspond to any ‘real’ language, and there are original languages only as a function of the philological discourse, not because of nature,” Said, Orientalism, p. 137. For a history of the emergence of what he calls “the synthetic disciplinary rubric” of anthropology from its ethnological roots and a meticulous survey of its disciplinary ideals, see George Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (London: The Free Press, 1987), p. 76. An example of this utopian belief in hybridity is Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s suggestion that the Canadian and Australian experience of cultural mosaic could generate discourses of literary hybridity and spatial plurality to replace linear models of nationalism. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 36. On the historiography of Victorian anthropology see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 208-219. On philology’s historiographical processes see Said, Orientalism, pp 143-148. Caren Kaplan in Questions of Travel, pp. 8-26, offers a good overview of the different types of postmodernism, which functions as a helpful

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background against which to read my statement about postmodernism’s use of western culture to generate its past-infected, future-orientated temporality. 88 David Lloyd, “Race Under Representation,” p. 63. 89 Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 199. 90 Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 199. 91 Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 199. Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel, Chapter Four, “Feminist Politics of Location,” offers an overview of gender and class informed accounts of postcolonial modernity which functions as a supplement to Osborne’s critique but also as an answer. 92 Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, eds, Dangerous Liaisons, p. 514. See also Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory and the response to Ahmad’s criticism in the special issue of Public Culture 6:1 (1993) on Ahmad’s In Theory. 93 See Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9/1 (1987), pp. 27-58. For a response to Parry’s critique of postcolonial theory and Spivak see my interview with Gayatri Spivak.: Maria Koundoura, “Interview with Gayatri Spivak,” Stanford Humanities Review 1/1 (Spring 1989), pp. 84-97. 94 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 4. 95 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 245. 96 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 245. 97 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 222. 98 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 222. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), addresses nostalgia as a modern illness. They describe it as central to identifications of home, the byproduct of property and the loss of man’s primal state. It is the thing that generates homesickness and the thing that we are homesick for, pp. 60-61. 99 Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 70. 100 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 114. 101 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 246. 102 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 246. 103 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post-’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post-’ in “Postmodern?” Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, eds, Dangerous Liaisons, p. 432. Achille Mbembe, in his response to Appiah, argues that the reason for this lack of “going beyond” is the forgetting of colonialism’s memories that has begun to set in postcolonial societies after the initial period of decolonization. Achille Mbembe,

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“Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities,” Public Culture 5/1 (Fall 1992), p. 353. 104 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 224. 105 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 253. Gourgouris writes: “In being nowhere, utopia has access to everywhere, a vision in motion always in the process of seeking a place. On the other hand, nostalgia, by virtue of its tremendous concentration on the trajectory of return, aims constantly at a fixed space,” Dream Nation, p. 224. 106 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 251. The ascendancy of postcolonialism in cultural criticism (obvious in the rapid rise of the field of postcolonial studies in the American academy in the 1980s) has been seen as the result of its affiliations with the emergent consciousness of global capitalism in the 1980s. Arif Dirlik has argued that “the appeals of the critical themes in postcolonial criticism have much to do with their resonance with the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships due to changes within the capitalist world economy,” “The Postcolonial Aura,” pp. 502-503. The success of the “feeling” for the postcolonial must also be seen as the result of its affiliation with the libidinal economy of postmodernity as “the ‘aporetic’ history of the sublime.” 107 This is the crux of Fredric Jameson’s critique of identity politics and its rewriting of the question of the intellectual as the question of representation. Jameson, “On Cultural Studies, ” pp. 279-280. 108 The critical response to “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is the best example of this. Both Benita Parry and Aijaz Ahmad, among others, have consistently criticized Spivak on this account. 109 Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, Sarah Harasym, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. 110 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 281. 111 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 281. 112 “It is women’s work that has continuously survived within not only varieties of capitalism but other historical and geographical modes of production. The economic, political, ideological, and legal heterogeneity of the relationship between the definitive mode of production and race and class-differentiated women’s and wives’ work is abundantly recorded.....women’s work is a sustained example of zero work: work not only outside of wage work, but, in one way or another, ‘outside’ of the definitive modes of production.” Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 83-84. 113 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 256. 114 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 256, 250. 115 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 250. 116 Egypt, of course, was the other of central importance in the early

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Renaissance to the Florentine thinkers that influenced the English, but, as Martin Bernal has shown in Black Athena, there was a specific “forgetting” of Egypt going on— to the point hat Egypt after the Mameluks and the Ottomans had become the colonizable space par excellence. 117 After all, as Bhabha tells us, in the tension between “the pedagogy of the symbols of progress, historicism, modernization, homogeneous empty time” and the “sign of the present” made up of all the “nonsynchronic passages of time in the archives of the new,” modernity “emerges as a form of interrogation:” what do I belong to in this present? The Location of Culture, p. 245. “This process,” he continues, “cannot be represented in the binary relation of archaism/modernity, past/present” because it blocks off the teleology of modernity, p. 245. 118 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 277. 119 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 277. 120 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 275. 121 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 174. 122 Jusdanis, Belated Modernity, pp. xvi-xvii. 123 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, p. 224. 124 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, p. 224. 125 Jusdanis, Belated Modernity, p. 12. 126 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 282. 127 I am arguing here against Caren Kaplan who, in Questions of Travel, argues that an awareness of the politics of location alerts us to the interpellation of the past in the present and undermines earlier assertions of progressive singular development, p. 187. This might be so in the case of the location of the object of our study, but is it the case with the development of our own history as critics? As I have argued elsewhere, it would be complicitous of Euro-American criticism, past and present, to ignore its long and complicated institutional history of using culture and value in nation-building (Koundoura, “Multiculturalism or Multinationalism?”) If this history is forgotten, criticism will remain the privileged paradigm of an ethical education that is nationalist in its objectives despite its inter or intra national goals. 128 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 279. 129 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 269. 1

Chapter Two

There were earlier English travelers to the Greek-speaking part of the Ottoman empire, the various lands of the historical areas of Greece, then an idea and not an independent geographical area. For an account

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of Renaissance maps of Greece, particularly the influential one of Nicolaos Sofianos, printed earlier than 1543, the year of its presumed second edition, a map that set the stage for later eighteenth and nineteenth century maps claim the boundaries of the modern Greek state, see George Tolias, “Totius Graecia: Nicolaos Sophianos’s Map of Greece and the Transformations of Hellenism,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001), pp. 1-22. Hakluyt tells us that in 1511 English ships sailed to Crete and Cyprus carrying English cloth in exchange for silks, spices, oils, carpets and mohair yarn. In 1513 Henry the VII appointed a consul at Chios; in 1520 at Crete. In 1553 Anthony Jenkinson was given freedom to trade in the Levant by Suleiman the Magnificent. In 1583 John Harborne, representing twelve merchants and the Queen, was the first merchant to take up residence in the Porte, see Alfred Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 164. Montagu’s presence in the area was due to this expansion. On April 7th 1716 her husband was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey. He represented the Levant Company, Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 55. For good historical accounts and bibliographies on these ealier travelers and their tales, I refer the reader to Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travelers’ Perceptions of Early Nineteenth Century Greece (London: Routledge, 1990); Hugh Tresgakis, Beyond the Grand Tour: The Levant Lunatics (London: Ascent Books, 1979); and Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1991). See also to Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire 1580-1720 (New York: Palgrave, 2004) for an account of early English visitors to the Ottoman empire. Robert Halsband, ed., The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 332. A note on my use of Halsband’s edition (hereafter referenced as Letters): it is the most complete in its incorporation of the strange publishing and editorial history of the Letters. Montagu, following her aristocratic code that a person of quality should never turn author, never published her letters in her lifetime, Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary, p. 255. They were first published in May of 1763 by T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt under the title, Letter of the Right Honourable Lady M___y W____y M____e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa…. The reputed author of this unauthorized edition is John Cleland. An additional volume was published by the same printer in 1767, also unauthorized and containing spurious additions. Halsband speculates that their authorship was the result of a wager that her style could be imitated.

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The third edition, published in 1803, was the first sanctioned by Montagu’s family. In 1805 there was another, identical to the 1803 but for some additional letters. There was an 1837 edition that included introductory anecdotes by Montagu’s granddaughter and an 1861 edition which is the most thorough in that it enlarged the existing letters with added material from the Wortley manuscripts that included Lady Mary’s albums, Halband, Letters, pp. xvii-xix. In the Wortley manuscripts there is a document written by her, and endorsed by Wortley, as “Heads of L. M.’s Letters from Turky.” In it she had jotted down the initials of correspondents with brief summaries of the letters she sent to them between 1 April, 1717 and 1 March, 1718. Among the “Heads” of letters for this date is the one I am quoting from. It is addressed to “Mr P”: “A Journey not pass’d since the G[reek] E[mperors]. Like to be overturn’d in the Hebrus. Comparison to Orpheus. Romantic situation the Fashion…,” Letters Vol. 1, p. 330. 3 Letters Vol. 1, p. 331. 4 Letters Vol. 1, p. 332. 5 Letters Vol. 1, p. 420. The discussion of Homer is in a letter addressed to the Abbe Conti dated 31 July 1718. As Halsband notes in his editor’s footnotes, the MS shows that Lady Mary had initially addressed this letter “To the Countesses of____” and had inserted “My dear Sister” into the body, but then struck these words out. Clearly, he notes in a footnote, she thought “Conti was a far more suitable recipient for such a virtuoso letter. Furthermore,” he adds, “she begins her next letter (28 Aug.) addressed to her sister, with the statement that she had written to Conti from Tunis,” Letters Vol. 1, p. 415, n1. 6 Letters Vol. 1, p. 420. 7 Schliemann was himself a believer in the mimetic veracity of Homer, carrying his copy of Homer with him and comparing its descriptions with the local topography. As for his own veracity, Schliemann has come under attack with recent work to commemorate his 150th anniversary showing that much of what he wrote about himself and his findings was fiction. See William Calder III and David Traill, eds, Myth, Scandal, and History: The Heinrich Schliemann Controversy and a First Edition of the Mycenaean Diary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986). 8 Letters Vol. 1, p. 385. 9 Letters Vol. 1, pp. 368, 385. 10 Letters Vol. 1, pp. 385, 380. 11 See, for example, Elizabeth Bowls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Joseph Lew, “Lady Mary’s Portable Seraglio,” Eighteenth Century Studies 24/4 (Summer 1991). Even though

NOTES

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19

20 21 22

23 24

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Said’s study gives no detailed account of orientalism before Napoleon, early eighteenth-century British and French accounts of the Ottoman empire are consistent with later representations of the Middle East, proving his point about the timelessness of such representations due to their use of citationality. Letters Vol. 1, pp. 420, 315. Said mentions Theodor Noldeke, a philhellenist who showed his love of Greece by displaying a positive dislike of the orient, which he nevertheless studied as a scholar, Said, Orientalism, p. 209. Letters Vol. 1, pp. 332, 364. Said, Orientalism, p. 21. Edward Clarke, Travels to Various Regions (London, 1810), p. 472. This is not to say, of course, that there were no other accounts of real travel to the region. MacLean, in The Rise of Oriental Travel, offers an account of actual English travelers’ visits to Greek speaking areas of the Ottoman empire from the sixteenth century onwards. Terence Spencer gives an account of this book and its author’s “imposture” in Fair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron (Athens: Denise Harvey and Company, 1986), p. 132. First published in 1958. See also David Constantine, “The Questions of Authenticity in Some Early Accounts of Greece,” in G.W. Clarke, ed. Rediscovering Hellenism, pp. 8-9, for an exploration of the authenticity of early travelers’ accounts to Greece. Said’s methodology’s influence is evident in recent work on travelers and travel writing which, displaying the growing interest in travel in the discipline of cultural studies, offers accounts of the representational strategies of displacement (the preferred term for travel in the age of postmodernity). See Kaplan, Questions of Travel and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge. 1992). Said, Orientalism, p. 21 “Wog” is a pejorative term used by some Anglo-Celtic Australians for Greek immigrants like myself. In the late 1980s and early 1990s immigrant theatre groups like “Wogs Out of Work” reclaimed that name by turning the stereotype on its head with their extreme representations of it. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). John Galt, Letters from the Levant (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), p. 78. This quote is from Vogue October 1995. There are countless similar views in popular magazines. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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26 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 224. 27 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 186. Ahmad’s overall critique, although problematic at best, demands that we assess the material conditions of literary and cultural criticism in the context of imperialism and capitalist expansion. 28 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 186. 29 Zizek, Looking Awry, p. 6. 30 Mary Louise Pratt suggests that Romanticism may not have originated in Europe but “in the contact zones of America, North Africa, and the South Seas,” Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p.138. My reading of Montagu’s Greeks adds Greece to this list of other places, despite its designation as the origin of Europe. 31 Said, The World, The Text, The Critic, p. 4 32 Said, Orientalism, p. 256. 33 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 86 34 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” p. 271. 35 Said, Orientalism, p. 166. 36 Bernal, Black Athena Vol.1, pp. 221, 281. 37 Bernal, Black Athena Vol. 1, p. 281. 38 Bernal, Black Athena Vol. 1, p. 282. 39 Bernal, Black Athena Vol. 1, p. 282. 40 Brian Turner, “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?” in G.W. Clarke, ed. Rediscovering Hellenism, p. 61. 41 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 67. 42 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 93. 43 “Culture,” he writes. “seeks to do away with classes; [and] to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light....This is the social idea and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality,” Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 67. 44 J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1882), p. 59. Mill argues that, because of their desire for progress, the English are the Hellenes of their day and that representative government, based on the democratic principles of Athens, is the best form of government, p. 59. In On Representative Government, Mill is the first to link nation= state =the people and all of them with territory, hence defining the nation-state. 45 Mill, On Representative Government, p. 158. 46 Mill, On Representative Government, pp. 188-189. Mill’s theory of political representation called into question previous assumptions about the relationship between facts and values and was instrumental (along with Arnold’s work) in founding a new theory of culture whose assumptions (as literary critics) we have inherited today. See Koundoura,

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48

49

50 51 52

53

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55

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“Multiculturalism or Multinationalism?” for an account of Mill and Arnold’s place in the discourse of English studies, English’s role in the construction of national subjects, and the reflection of Mill and Arnold’s work in current literary critical practices. So important is education in Mill’s program (he argues that its “spirit” shapes the national character) that he prioritizes its universal application over that of the franchise. “If society has neglected to discharge two solemn obligations,” he writes, “the more important and fundamental of the two must be fulfilled first; universal teaching must precede universal enfranchisement,” Mill, On Representative Government, p. 175. For good accounts on the rise of English studies see Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London: MacMillan, 1988); Robert Colls and Philp Dodd, eds, Englishness; Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism; and Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The title of the Report is The Teaching of English in England (London: H.M.S.O, 1926). For an account of the Newbolt Report see Koundoura, “Multiculturalism or Multinationalism?” and Cargi Bhattacharyya, “Cultural Education in Britain: From the Newbolt Report to the National Curriculum,” Oxford Literary Review 13/1 (1991), pp. 2-11. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p. 6. Spencer, Fair Greece, p. vii. Its charter was issued in 1580, reconfirmed in 1581, and reissued in 1661. It operated with the last one until its dissolution in 1825. See Wood, A History of the Levant Company, p. 202. It is interesting to note that one third of the Levant Company’s merchants formed the East India Company. With the latter’s formation, the trade of the former deteriorated. The only signs of expansion that the Levant Company showed during the eighteenth century was in its trade in Greece, Wood, A History of the Levant Company, pp. 162-164. The Rambler, No. 122 (1751). Johnson used an incident in Knolles to write his Irene, see Spencer, Fair Greece, pp. 249-256. Aaron Hill, A Full Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: John Mayo, 1909), p. 110. Hill had gone to Constantinople at an early age and traveled extensively in the area, returning in England when he was eighteen in 1703. See Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) for a good study on Hill. There are many accounts on the demoticists, that is Greek populists’, claims for Romiosini (Greekness) and its ideal in Constantinople and Byzantium, among them, Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism and Michael

160 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78

79 80

THE GREEK IDEA Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Hill, A Full Account, p. 175. Letters Vol. 1, p. 405. Letters Vol. 1, p. 368. Letters Vol. 1, p. 330. Letters Vol. 1, p. 330. Letters Vol. 1, p. 330. Letters Vol. 1, p. 385. Letters Vol. 1, p. 380. This quote prompted Halsband to write in a footnote: “Here is one explanation for LM’s compilation of the Embassy letters,” Letters Vol. 1, p. 389 n1. Said, Orientalism, p. 21. Letters Vol. 1, p. 312-315, 385, 387, 385, 405-407. Letters Vol. 1, pp. 408-409. Letters Vol. 1, p. 385. Letters Vol. 1, p. 386. Said, Orientalism, p. 176. Letters Vol. 1, pp. 421-422. Letters Vol. 1, pp. 208-209. He later cites and praises her for “resolve” in “protecting Beauty, and inspiring Wit” in The Plain Dealer, 27 Apr., 3 Jul 1724, Halsband, Lady Mary, p. 114. Letters Vol. 1, p. 422. Said draws upon Marx’s famous reference to nineteenth-century French peasantry in The 18th Brumaire, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” and argues that it the modus operandi of orientalist practice, Orientalism, p. 21. In the process, he returns to Marx’s vertreten (“to represent”) its other signification: “to replace, to act as a substitute.” Letters Vol. 1, p. 332. Letters Vol. 1, p. 364. Letters Vol. 1, p. 422. See Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, Hugh Tresgakis, Terence Spencer, Robert Eisner, and Timothy Webb, among many. For the reader who wants to read reprints of representative samples of this work organized historically, see Webb, ed., English Romantic Hellenism. In 1757, for example, The Gentleman’s Magazine had a description with a copper-plate illustration of the “Tower of the Winds” while The Lady’s Magazine offered to its readers a “Sketch of a Voyage to Athens,” Spencer, Fair Greece, pp. 169-170. See Bernal, Black Athena (Chapter 7), for an overview of the classicists who were publishing at this time and their difference from the earlier humanists.

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81 Even though his object, tracing the demise of the Ancient Model of Classical Civilization, is different than the one undertaken in this essay, Martin Bernal, especially chapter 7, provides the reader with a good overview of the classicists that were publishing at this time and their difference with the earlier humanists. 82 Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, pp. 67-68. 83 Robert Wood, A Comparative View of the antient and present state of the Troade. To which is prefixed an Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (London: John Richardson, 1824), “To The Reader.” First published in 1767. Upon visiting the supposed site of Troy, like Montagu, he was impressed by the exact geography of Homer and demanded its careful study by those who wished to understand Homer. 84 “Born for Opposition:” Byron’s Letters and Journals Vol. 8, Leslie Marchand, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 22. Hereafter referred to as Letters and Journals Vol. 8. 85 John Buxton, The Grecian Taste: Literature in the Age of Neo-Classicism 1740-1820 (London: MacMillan, 1978). 86 For a detailed account of the Society see Tresgakis, Beyond the Grand Tour. 87 Instructions of the Society to Richard Chandler dated May 17th, 1764 and printed by him in his Travels in Asia Minor (Oxford 1775). 88 Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor, parts reprinted in Webb, English Romantic Hellenism, pp.158-167. 89 See John Buxton, The Grecian Taste; Spencer, Fair Greece. 90 James Stuart, Nicholas Revett, “Proposals for Publishing an accurate description of the Antiquities of Athens 1751.” Reprinted from the first edition of The Antiquities of Athens (1762) in Webb. English Romantic Hellenism, p. 94. 91 See, for example, Spencer, Fair Greece, p. vii; Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, pp. 67-68; and Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, p. 50, among many. 92 Halsband, Lady Mary, pp. 113, 141-2, 144, 149, 150. 93 Letters, Vol. 1, p. 423. 94 Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Act of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 95 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, pp. xvi. 164. 96 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. xvi. 97 Other studies include Lennard Davis’s. He argues in Factual Fictions that the novel developed primarily out of what he calls the “new-novel

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matrix,” that is, journalism, scandal, and political and religious controversy. See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). 98 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 165. 99 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 174. 100 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, pp. 174, 173. 101 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, pp. 174-175. Sympathy as a tool for inculcating moral sentiments has become a commonplace term in studies on the eighteenth-century novel. It was linked with the imagination, and both were linked with ethics; the new cultural prestige of fiction depended on this link, these studies argue. But they never address the question, Gallagher tells us, as to why fiction, and no other form of narrative, should have seemed to have a peculiar affinity with sympathetic sensibilities, Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 166, n56. She answers this question through her controversial argument on fictional nobodies. 102 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. xvii. 103 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, pp. 169, 170. Hume identifies three principles through which this happens: certain sense data communicate the idea of someone else’s emotional state, that idea becomes an impression through certain relational principles (cause and effect, contiguity and resemblance), and the impression can, under certain conditions become so enlivened that it becomes a sentiment. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 319. “The conversion of idea into sentiment,” Gallagher tells us in her reading of Hume, “is most likely to occur when all three relational principles operate in a way that obscures the ‘otherness’ of the original sufferer,” Nobody’s Story, p. 169. 104 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 172. 105 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. xvii. 106 Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. xvii. 107 Letters Vol. 1, p. 332, 331. 108 As she herself shows—in her criticism of other travel writers’ work as “diversions,” in her insistence at being dissociated from them (and from histories), and in her desire to be seen as “truthful— being there was no guarantee of the “truthfulness” of one’s account. Claiming the truthfulness of one’s accounts on the fact that they were one’s own, that is, a product of one’s authorship, though, was, especially after the 1710 Statute of Anne, often called the first copyright law in English history, and its implication that copyright might be a property of the author, Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 155; Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Popevs Curll (1741),” Cultural Critique 21 (Spring 1992), pp. 197-217. 1992. Legally, then, Montagu was not telling lies. 109 Fiction, insofar as it claims to be mimetic, admits that it is a construct. Eighteenth-century readers knew this, and it is precisely for this reason

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that they read novels. See William Donoghue, “Ends and the Means To Avoid Them: Skepticism and the fin de siecle,” SubStance 85 (1998), pp. 3-19. As Gallagher has argued, novels provided a means for identifying with the universal and particularizing it as one’s own, Nobody’s Story, p.168. This is why fiction, and in particular the novel, for Gallagher (following Foucault), functions as a “benign instrument of selfdiscipline, at once regulating, normalizing, and individuating its readers,” Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, p. 284. In the context of what he calls the “skeptical turn” of the time, Donoghue has added that realist fiction’s “‘deceptions’ provided readers with a ‘truth’ that was exempt from the ‘epistemological crisis’” of skepticism and also with the ability to learn from “as if ” worlds, “Ends and the Means,” p. 10. 110 While this chapter examines how this “no-one” became someone (through the work of travelers, classicists, and novelists, Chapter Three of this book explores how the constructed “someone” of Greece was made into the national “someone” by the Greeks. 111 Byron admired Lady Mary, writing in a January 28, 1810 letter to his mother of her Letters: “by the bye, her Ladyship, as far as I can judge, has lied,” “In My Hot Youth:” Byron’s Letters and Journals Vol. 1., Leslie Marchand, ed., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 250, hereafter referred to as Letters and Journals Vol. 1. 112 “The paradox of Humean sympathy,” Gallagher concludes, is that “another’s internal state becomes ‘intimately present’ only by losing its distinct quality of belonging to someone else,” Nobody’s Story, p. 170. 113 Jerome McGann, ed., Byron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 96. 114 Letters and Journals, Vol. 1, p. 266. 115 McGann, Byron, p. 100. 116 “Famous in My Time:” Byron’s Letters and Journals Vol. 2, Leslie Marchand, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 164, hereafter referred to as Letters and Journals Vol. 2. 117 Galt, Letters from the Levant, pp. 62-63. 118 Galt, Letters from the Levant, pp. 340-341. 119 Galt, Letters from the Levant, p. 143. 120 Chapter Three traces the work of Greek intellectuals such as Korais writing at this time. 121 McGann, Byron, p. 95. 122 McGann, Byron, pp. 95-96. 123 Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1973), p. 82. For an account of this journey see Stephen Cheeke, “Being There: Byron and Hobhouse seek the ‘real’ Parnassus,” Romanticism 7/2 (2001), pp. 127-144. 124 Letters and Journals Vol. 2, p. 35. 125 Letters and Journals Vol. 2, p. 219, Vol. 8, p. 13. 126 Letters and Journals Vol. 8, p. 221.

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127 McGann, Byron, p. 62. 128 Cheeke mentions Byron’s sketch of Parnassus as a triangle made of the names of contemporary poets with Walter Scott as its pinnacle, “Being There,” p. 139. See also Bernal, Black Athena, p. 207. 129 McGann, Byron, p. 187. 130 Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p.139. 131 Letters and Journals Vol. 2, p. 134. 132 Letters and Journals, Vol. 2, p. 163. 133 Letters and Journals Vol. 2, p. 37. 134 William Gilpin popularized the term “picturesque.” He used the term for the most part to appreciate those accidental scenes that might be encountered by the traveler. Distinguishing between the beautiful and the picturesque, Gilpin makes a distinction between objects “which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting,” Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (Farnborough, England: Gregg, 1972), p. 42. First published in 1792. He remarks that, “the picturesque eye is not merely restricted to nature. It ranges through the limits of art. The picture, the statue, and the garden are all objects of its attention,” Three Essays, p. 45. The picturesque represents a point of view that frames the world and turns nature into a series of living tableaux. It begins as an appreciation of natural beauty, but it ends by turning people into figures in a landscape or figures in a painting. Coinciding with a discovery of the natural world, anticipating an imaginative projection of self into the landscape through an act of transport or identification, it assumes an attitude that seems to depend on distance and separation. For an account of the history of the picturesque and the debates within it see David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35/3 (2002), pp. 413-437. Distance and separation, imaginative projection of self into the landscape and distancing oneself from the figures in that landscape (oneself included) is what characterizes Byron’s “inhabiting” of the picturesque. 135 McGann, Byron, p. 95. 136 Letters and Journals Vol. 2, p. 59. 137 It is no wonder that later, through his death, he served as a link between antiquity and modernity in the Neohellenic national/cultural imaginary, eager, as it was, to claim a narrative of continuity and secure a place for itself the discourse of Eurocentrism. 138 Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 412, 441. 139 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 170. 140 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 176. Of the thirty-five books on Greece that

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were published between 1800 and 1826, The Last Man is the most striking and the best example of the wave of Philhellenism that hit Britain during the years of the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule (1821-1830). For a bibliographical listing of all the texts on Greece of the period, see Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival. Apart of the published books, she also notes that ten unpublished diaries and journals of that same period also exist in libraries and archives in Britain, pp. 6-7. 141 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) makes the distinction between classicism, which he calls Hellenism, and Philhellenism clear when he defines Philhellenism as non-Greek sympathy for modern Greeks, particularly the Greek cause of emancipation and self-determination. This sympathy, derived from a love for the cultural heritage of ancient Hellas, should be distinguished, he tells us, from Hellenism, the antiquarian interest in Hellas. 142 Its “Hellenic” past is evident in the idea of a common ground that haunts contemporary criticism even of the radical kind. Andrew Ross in “Defenders of the Faith and the New Class” in Robbins, Intellectuals, Aesthetics, Politics, argues for this “common ground” and asks those of us who are interested in changing the times to use it as the stepping stone “from which to contest the existing definitions of a populardemocratic culture,” p. 129. 143 Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 148-149. 144 Barbara Johnson, “The Last Man,” Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor, Esther Schor eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frakenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 263. 145 Steven Goldsmith, “Of Gender, Plague, and the Apocalypse: Shelley’s Last Man,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 4/1 (1990), p. 166. 146 Johnson, “The Last Man,” p. 33. 147 Johnson, “The Last Man,” p. 264. 148 Johnson, “The Last Man,” p. 265. 149 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 184. 150 de Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” pp. 90-91 151 Shelley, The Last Man, pp.13, 14, 19. 152 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 29, 77. 153 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 9. 154 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 233. 155 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 148. 156 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 466. 157 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 468, 469, 470. 158 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 35.

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159 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 185, 189. 160 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 175. 161 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 26-27, 161-162. 162 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 153. 163 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 184. 164 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 33, 182. 165 Goldsmith, “Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse,” pp. 148, 149. 166 Susan Gilbert, Sandra Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 95-104. 167 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 6, 181. 168 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 6. 169 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 7. 170 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 6. 171 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 5, 6. 172 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 6. 173 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 6. 174 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 113. 175 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 75. 176 Shelley, The Last Man, pp. 35, 180, 182. 177 Goldsmith, “Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse,” p. 148. 178 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (South Bend: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 343. 179 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. L. R. Lind (South Bend: Indiana University Press, 1962), VI-110-112. 180 Commenting on both meanings in her critique of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s conflations of interest and desire in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak argues that there is a difference between “darstellen” and “vertreten,” the two words for representation in Marx. “Darstellen” and its meaning of drawing two things or people together because of a likeness that dispels difference works on the tropological level as metaphor (the metaphor Spivak gives to exemplify this is portraiture). “Vertreten” and its meaning of exchange, in principle speaking on the basis of an identity, works on the political level (she uses proxy to explain this meaning of representation). Deleuze and Foucault, operating under liberal bourgeois ideology’s assumption that, in a democratic society, citizens choose and accept their representatives because those representatives share their identity and are therefore able to articulate their political views and interests, slide over the difference between “darstellen” and “vertreten,” portraiture and proxy, which is the double meaning of representation in the political sense. Such a sliding over, Spivak argues, implicitly and dangerously denies that there is any gap between interest and desire. She recognizes that “darstellen” and

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“vertreten” “are related, but running them together, especially in order to say that beyond them both is where oppressed subjects speak, act, and know for themselves, leads to essentialist utopian politics,” “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 276-277. 181 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 466. 182 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 187. 183 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 170. It is the future, Greece is free, but the Acropolis, still engendering feelings of awe as it did for Shelley’s Romantic contemporaries, has not changed. Nor does it belong to the free Greeks. After all, as Ernest Renan later writes in, “Priere sur l’Acropole” (1865), “it is a type of eternal beauty without local or nationalist color,” Ernest Renan, Prière sur l’Acropole: With Readings from the Original Manuscript, Eugene Vinaver and T.B.L. Webster, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934). The “our” of the enthusiasm that the “mighty dead” Greeks observed, meanwhile, was not the enthusiasm of the newly liberated populace, but that of the English Verney and his friends. 184 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 466. 1

Chapter Three

See Kyriakos Demetriou for an account of the representation of the figure of Alexander in two different histories of Greece: George Grote’s 12 volumes, published between 1846 and 1856 in England, and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’ six volumes, published between 1860 and 1874. Grote, Demetriou shows, saw Alexander as the figure that breaks the tradition of ancient Greece, whereas Paparrigopoulos saw him as the link that provides continuity between ancient and modern Greece. Kyriakos Demetriou, “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001), pp. 23-60. 2 R.S. Peckham, National Histories, Natural States, Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: IB Tauris, 2001); Paschalis Kitromilidis, “Imagined Communities and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” Thanos Veremis, ed., National Identity and Nationalism in Modern Greece (Athens: MIET, 1997); Herzfeld, Ours Once More. 3 Constantinos Tsoucalas, “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe and a Changing World Order,” Harry Psomiades and Stavros Thomadakis, eds., Greece, the New Europe, and the Changing International Order (New York: Pella, 1993); Yiorgos Chouliaras, “Greek Culture in the New Europe,” Psomiades and Thomadakis eds., Greece, the New Europe, and the Changing International Order; K. Th. Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos: His Epoch, His Life, His Work (Athens: Morfotiko Idrima Ethnikis Trapezis, 1986) (in Greek).

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4 Working from the field of Mediterranean studies, Irad Malkin has shown that the inscription of Greekness onto Alexander (and not only the Great but Alexander I [498-454 BCE]) began much earlier than modern Greek independence. He gives examples from the mid-fourth century and reads them in the context of the Hellenistic world and its construction of the definition of Greekness as dependent on status and culture. Irad Malkin, “Postcolonial Concepts and Ancient Greek Colonization,” Modern Language Quarterly 65/3 (September 2004), pp. 341-364. 5 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 71. 6 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 72. 7 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, pp 70-71. 8 Demetriou, “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” p. 46. 9 See Anastasia Karakasidou, “The Burden of the Balkans,” Anthropological Quarterly 75/3 (2002), pp. 575-589 for an account of the beginning of the ideological struggle between Bulgaria and Greece in the late 1870s early 1880s over Macedonia. See also Nikolaos Zahariadis, “Greek Response to the Macedonian Question,” Political Science Quarterly 109/4 (1994), pp. 647-667. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche,“On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11 Adamantios Korais, “Report on the Present State of Civilization in Greece,” Elie Kedourie, ed. Nationalism in Asia and Africa (NY: NAL Book, 1970), p.145. First published in Lettres Inédites de Coray à Chardon de la Rochette. Paris (1877). 12 Korais, “Report,” p. 154. 13 Korais, “Report,” p. 171. See George Stocking Jr, “French Anthropology in 1800,” Isis 55/2 (1964), pp. 134-150 for an account of French anthropological discourse’s view of civilization at the time of Korais’ address. The Société, according to Stocking, was in many ways the first anthropological institution, applying itself to the study of culture and society in the name of nature. Its membership, led by linguists, naturalists, explorers, and archaeologists united in the project of establishing “The Natural History of Man,” p. 135. See also George Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology, pp. 9-18, 25-30, 76. Commenting on the effect of this intersection on Korais, Gourgouris argues that “in its very composition, the Société marks, archaeologically, the site of the transition—hence, intersection—between natural history and philology,” Dream Nation, p. 110. 14 Korais, “Report,” pp. 169, 173. 15 Korais, “Report,” p. 180.

NOTES 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32

169

Stocking, “French Anthropology in 1800.” Korais, “Report,” p. 153. Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 109. There are many scholars who have traced Korais’ contribution to Greek history and letters. Most recently, Stathis Gourgouris, and earlier Filipos Iliou who, in “Ideological Uses of Koraism in the Twentieth Century,” Two Days of Korais (Athens: Center For Neohellenic Studies, 1984), pp. 143-201, argues against the later rejection of Korais by demoticist ideology, Neohellenic Marxism, and the recent populist wave of neoOrthodoxy. These are all bound, he suggests, by a sterilized simulacrum of Korais produced at the hands of official Hellenic ideology, pp.151-152. This was the language used by the state and its institutions, including educational, until 1976 when it was abandoned in favor of the demotic, the language spoken by the people in general, not just the educated elite. Tsoucalas, “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe,” p. 68. Tsoucalas, “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe,” p. 68. The “effect of identity of race and descent...community of language and community of religion...geographical limits...[and] the strongest of all, identity of political antecedents,” are Mill’s criteria of nationality in Considerations on Representative Government, p. 308. Tsoucalas, “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe,” p. 69. Korais, “Report,” p. 158. Korais, “Report,” p. 158. Tsoucalas, “Greek National Identity in an Integrated Europe,” p. 69. Greek citizenship laws are based upon the Code of Greek Citizenship Law No. 3370/57) amended in 1968, 1984, 1991. See Z. PapasiopiPasia, Citizenship Law (Athens: Sakkoulas, 1994), p. 45, 93 (in Greek). The latest law is Law No. 2910/2001, Chapter 13, paragraphs 58-70 (Greek Government Print house, Document No 91, May 2, 2001). As Elli Skopetea points out, in 1844, the year when the clash between the autochthons and heterochthons became public in the National Assembly, the third article of the Constitution addressed again the question of Greek citizenship which, at this time, was “confused with the definition of the attributes of the Greek civil servant,” Elli Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio kai I Megali Idea 1830-1880 (Athens: Politypo, 1988) p. 51 (in Greek). Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 52. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 52. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 58. Nikos Chrysoloras traces the ties between the church and Greek nationalism from the new state’s institution to today in “Religion and Nationalism in Greece,” Paper presented at the Second Pan-European Conference, Standing Group on EU Politics, Bologna, 24-26 June, 2004.

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33 See Victor Roudometof, “From Roum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularization, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society 1543-1821,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 16/13(1998), p.13. Today this class/ethnic conflation continues, with the term Vlach applying not only to the homonymous minority in Greece but also to a poor, peasant Greek, someone not used to the city ways. 34 D.A. Zakynthinos, The Making of Modern Greece: From Byzantium to Independence, trans. K.R. Johnstone (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), p. 189. 35 Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 67. Today still, Greek law uses the term homogenís (singular)/homogeneis (plural) to define the non-Greek citizen of Greek ethnic origin, thus a member of a Greek minority in a foreign country. As this composite word describes, homogenís is a person who is part of the same genos (descent or race). The principle that lies behind the legal status of homogenís is that the individual is a descendent of Greeks. However, what is decisive in their application for citizenship is their ‘Greek national consciousness’. The latter is defined as the connection with the Greek nation through common language, religion and traditions. See Papasiopi-Pasia, Greek Citizenship Law, pp. 45, 93. 36 Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 77. 37 Constantinos Tsoucalas, Dependency and Reproduction: The Social Role of Educational Mechanisms in Greece (1830-1922) (Athens: Themelio, 1977), p. 25 (in Greek). 38 Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 75; Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 87. 39 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 172. 40 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, pp. 109-110. 41 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, pp. 117-119. 42 Demetriou, “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” p. 24. 43 Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ethnous [History of the Greek Nation] (Athens: N. Passaris, 1860-74), Vol. 2, p. 176. Also cited in Demetriou, “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” p. 45. 44 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, p. 124. 45 Herzfeld, in his Chapter Three, offers accounts of the different ethnicities at the origin of the modern Greek state. See also Rodanthi Tzanelli, “Haunted by the ‘Enemy’ Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish ‘Contamination,’ and Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002), pp. 47-74. 46 Paparrigopoulos, History, Vol. 2, p. 177. 47 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 171. 48 Demetriou, “Historians on Macedonian Imperialism and Alexander the Great,” p. 46.

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49 Paparrigopoulos, History Vol. 2, p. 173. 50 Antonis Liakos, “The Construction of Time in Greek Historiography.” O Politis 124 (December 1993), p. 25. 51 Thanos Veremis, “National State to Stateless Nation 1821-1910,” Martin Blinkhorn and Thanos Veremis, eds., Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality (Athens: ELIAMEP, 1990), p. 13. 52 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 381. 53 Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 64 54 To this day, Greeks still justify their Hellenism in response to what they see as the assault of Fallmerayer and his epigones on their connection to their past. The most recent example of this was the deluge of discussions in the 1990s in Greece and in the Greek diaspora on his impact on the position held by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia regarding its claim to the name Macedonia. 55 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, p. 75. 56 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 94. 57 Herzfeld, Ours Once More, p. 79; Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 94. 58 Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, p. 93. 59 Ironically, as Gourgouris points out, “what has not been given adequate attention is that both writers converge on the notion that Neohellenic civilization ‘began’ with the Byzantine colonization of Athens in the tenth century;” it is just that what Fallmerayer sees as a re-Hellenization of an already Slavified population, Paparrigopoulos sees as the intractable dominance of Hellenic culture, Dream Nation, p. 145, n16. 60 Paparrigopoulos used the argument that it would be impossible to map the Ottoman empire fully because of its multilingual, multiethnic character. That is why he suggested to Heinrich Kiepert (1819-1899), the reputable map-maker working with the Association for the Dissemination of Greek Learning, that he produce an “ethnocratic” map (a term he coined). Among the maps the Society produced were a map of “Macedonian Hellenism at the Time of Alexander the Great” and of “Medieval Hellenism during the Macedonian dynasty of the Byzantine Emperors.” Paparrigopoulos’ influence is quite clear here, Tolias, “Totius Graecia,” p. 13. 61 Nations are imagined communities, Anderson argues, because of their fictional, that is, their myth-historical, energy. He underscores the importance of temporal/spatial simultaneity in the making of every nation, describing the conflation of past and future into a permanent present as the empty, homogeneous narrative time of the nation, a form borrowed from fiction. 62 See Zakynthinos, The Making of Modern Greece, pp. 157-167 for an early reading of Ferraios along these lines. For a current day reading of Ferraios, see Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (London: Berg, 2001). For a good account of the polyphony in the

172 63 64 65

66 67

68 69 70 71

72 73

74

75

THE GREEK IDEA territory that was Greece and the Balkans around the time of Ferraios, see Roudometof, “From Roum Millet to Greek Nation.” Zakynthinos, The Making of Modern Greece, p. 164. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 35. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), pp. 18-19 and 23-24 for an account of the principle of nationality at this time. He identifies the early nineteenth century as the point of a shift from the idea of nation characteristic of the era of Revolutions, citizenship, sovereignty, to the idea of nation=the state=people first identified by J.S. Mill in On Representative Government. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 136. Dimaras notes Yeorgios Constantinou, World History (1759, 1763); Ioannis Manthou, History of the Occupation of the Morea (1720); Spiros Papadopoulos, History of the Current War (1770-1773) among many, in Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, pp. 50-51. See also Kitromilidis and Zakynthinos. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction, p. 67. History Vol. 2, p. 420. Dimaras, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, pp. 285, 287-288. Roudometof, “From Rum Millet,” p. 29. Influenced by the French Revolution and autonomous practices coming out of the spaces of communal organization in the Balkans, Ferraios’ works are “textualizations of social-imaginary elements, even though they might seem to be radical innovations based on foreign models,” Gourgouris, Dream Nation, p. 85. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 190. The promise of future glories, and the displacement of the present, made that present bearable for then Greeks. The “underdevelopment and poverty did not warrant the loyalty of its [the state’s] subjects, but the promise of a glorious future did,” writes Thanos Veremis of the first sixty years of the Greek state, in “National State to Stateless Nation 1821-1910,” p. 11. The nation-form, Étienne Balibar writes, “constitutes an institutional means of preserving the rule of exclusion or insisting upon its necessity,” in We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23. Of course they also did not imagine Greece the way Rhigas Ferraios did as the inheritor of the Ottoman empire’s territories, but as the place of Hellenism, a limited geographical place at that.

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76 This makes it a living ruin: no wonder, then, Philhellenism’s exaltation in them and the modern Greek state’s obsession with antiquities. As Skopetea writes, “From the point of view of the State, the ancient monuments were the only ready-made national symbols it could use,” To Protipo Vasileio, p. 197. For an account of the use of antiquities by the newly emerged Greek state, see Effie Athanassopoulou, “An ‘Ancient’ Landscape: European Ideals, Archaeology, and Nation Building in Early modern Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002), pp. 273-305. 77 My reading of Shelley’s The Last Man in Chapter Two illustrates the metaphoric use of Greece as the “frontier” against the Turkish/Asiatic “infection” as it also illustrates the ambiguity towards Greece as also a carrier of that disease. 78 Max Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth,” Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), cited in Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 39. 79 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 46-47. 80 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 5. 81 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 196. 82 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 197. 83 Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 84 Faced with American nationalism and responding to Rorty’s argument for patriotism, for the need of Americans to “give central importance to ‘the emotion of national pride’ and ‘a sense of shared national identity,’” Martha Nussbaum counters: “to give support to nationalist sentiments subverts, ultimately, even the values that hold a nation together, because it substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right.” If these values transcend gender, ethnicity, and class divisions, she reasons, and can be used to form a common culture within the nation, why cannot they also transcend national boundaries? “The very same groups exist both outside and inside,” she writes. “Why should we think of people from China as our fellows the minute they dwell in a certain place, namely the United States, but not when they dwell in a certain other place, namely China?” Wanting to correct this narrow practice of the universal values of justice and right, she proposes cosmopolitanism as an alternative and drafts an educational program that she thinks will allow Americans to “recognize humanity wherever it occurs and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.” Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Joshua Cohen, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

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85 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 189. 86 Zakynthinos, The Making of Modern Greece, p. 188; Dimaras, Konstantionos Paparrigopoulos, pp. 78-79. 87 International law affirms that each state can determine who will be considered a citizen of that state; domestic laws about who is a citizen vary significantly from state to state as do the definitions of what it entails to be a citizen. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, pp. 281-282. 88 Konstantinos Tsitselikes, “Citizenship in Greece: Present Challenges for Future Changes,” (Athens: KEMO. 2003). 89 Today it is gaining popularity: it is becoming the means through which Greece theorizes and addresses multiple ethnicity in its borders and around them. In a July 11th 2006 editorial in the Washington Times, Alexandros Mallias, Greece’s US ambassador, talked about Greece’s role in formulated new visions of regional rights in the Balkans through the EU and other supranational organizations, arguing that such policies are reflective of Ferraios’ vision of a Balkan federation. 90 The following are the Treaties signed by Greece since its statehood that have affected its territorial boundaries and population: 1. The Convention on the annexation of Ionian Islands to Greece of 1864; 2. The Treaty of Constantinople of 1881, between Greece and the Ottoman Empire on the annexation of Thessalia-Arta by Greece; 3. The Peace Treaty of Athens of 1st November 1913, between Greece and the Ottoman Empire on the annexation of the New Territories by Greece; 4. The Treaty of Neuilly of 1919 between Greece and Bulgaria on reciprocal and volunteer migration of minorities; 5. The Convention of Lausanne of 1923 under which the issue of the obligatory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey was regulated; 6. The Treaties of Sèvres on: a. The territory of Thrace and b. The protection of minorities living in Greece (both applied by Legislative Decree of 29.9.1923); 8. The Treaty between Greece and Albania on nationality of 1926; 9. The Treaty of Ankara of 1930 signed between Greece and Turkey concerning the mode of application of the Lausanne Treaty on the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations; 10. The Agreement on the recognition the members of 144 Israelite families residing in Greece as Spaniards, signed between Greece and Spain in 1936; and 11. The Peace Treaty of Paris of 1947 signed between allied/co-allied powers and Italy by which—among other issues—the nationality issues concerning the inhabitants of the Dodecanese islands were regulated, Tsitselikis, “Citizenship in Greece”. 91 Nikos Alivizatos, The Political Institutions in Crisis 1922-1974: Aspects of the Greek Experience (Athens: Themelio, 1982), pp. 487, 491 (in Greek). 92 For an account of the history of the civil war, the politics around it, and their effect on contemporary Greek culture, see Yiorgos

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Chouliaras, “A History of Politics Versus a Politics of History: Greece 1936-1949,” Journal of Modern Hellenism 6 (1989), pp. 207-221. 93 Dimitris Christopoulos, Konstantinos Tsitselikis, “Treatment of Minorities and Homogeneis in Greece: Relics and Challenges” (Athens: KEMO, 2003). Miltos Pavlou, “Greek State Policy from ‘irredentism’ to ‘homecoming’/ ‘immigration’: the case of two repatriated kin minority groups,” (Athens: KEMO, 2002). 94 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 195. 95 Saskia Sassen, The Global City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 96 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 66. 97 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Hans Reiss, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 105-106. 98 The Eurocentric and racial context of Kant’s work on cosmopolitanism, a context that is part of “Project for Perpetual Peace,” is even more evident in his “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” in which he first defines and classifies the character of a person as the reference point upon which the sexes, a nation, and ultimately the races and species are built. His geopolitical distribution of Europe, anticipating Hegel’s tripartite division of it into the core (England, France and Germany), the south, and the northeast, he excludes from nationhood proper Southern Europeans like the Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese because of their mixture with Arabs and Moors. Meanwhile, Greeks, Russians, and Turks, whom he did not see even as second class nations, had a long way to go in his eyes, before becoming cosmopolitan, i.e. core-like nations. 99 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 100 Balibar, We the People of Europe, p. 67. 101 Stephanos Stavrou, “Human Rights in Greece: Twelve Years of Supervision from Strasbourg,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 17/1(1999), p. 5. 102 Stavrou, “Human Rights in Greece,” p. 16. 103 The Treaty was imposed in the wake of military defeat, and the USA, for one, does not recognize it. 104 Christopoulos and Tsitselikes, “Treatment of Minorities and Homogeneis in Greece.” 105 The provisions of the 1968 Bilateral Greco-Turkish Cultural Protocol, Section (V), entitled “Respect of the religious, race and national consciousness,” establish the principle of non-offence regarding the ethnic identity and religion of Muslim students, provided that they

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abide by the Greek laws, Christopoulos and Tsitselikes “Treatment of Minorities and Homogeneis in Greece”. The provision clearly implies the manifestation of a different ethnic identity by Muslim students. Having expressly stipulated that minority school students should be taught the Muslim religion, they are also considered to have a different national consciousness, which, even if it is not expressly mentioned, is not to be offended. However, the impasse underlies the critical question: if education aims, in accordance with the Constitution, not only to promote the Muslim religion but also to promote an ethnic identity, and if the minority expresses a consciousness other than Greek, then which consciousness is this—in accordance with the law—and how is it to be promoted? This is where constituted citizenship needs to engage with constituent citizens so that key elements in the right of citizens, such as freedom of religion and access to education, are not left to stagnate, held hostage to national ideology transformed into legal norm. 106 Gayatri Spivak, Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet (Vienna: Passagen, 1999), pp. 12, 52. 107 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 9. 108 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 23-25. 109 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, pp. 26, 12. 110 Her deconstructive reading has been criticized of, among other things, de-historicizing, privileging philosophical time, generalizing, and “mimimg” primitivism, i.e. being elitist. An example is Chetan Bhatt’s review of Spivak’s work “Kant’s ‘raw man’ and the miming of primitivism: Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason,’” Radical Philosophy 105 (Jan/Feb 2001), pp. 37-44. 111 Manfred Riedel, “Transcendental Politics? Political Legitimacy and the Concept of Civil Society in Kant,” Social Research 48 (1981), pp. 611612. 112 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” pp. 611-612. 113 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” p. 603. 114 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” pp, 606-607. 115 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” p. 610. Riedel is citing Kant from Gesämmelte Schriften, Prussian Academy of Sciences Edition, 22 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902-38). Here specifically, Vols 6: 314 and 8: 295. 116 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” pp. 610-611. 117 Riedel, “Transcendental Politics,” p. 611. 118 Gayatri Spivak,“Righting Wrongs,” Nicholas Owen, ed., Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 171. 119 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 6. 120 Spivak,“Righting Wrongs,” p. 173. 121 Spivak,“Righting Wrongs,” p. 200.

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122 Spivak,“Righting Wrongs,” p, 199. 123 Spivak,“Righting Wrongs,” p. 199. 1

2

3

Chapter Four

The fear of being seen as Slavic and the danger of Slavicization has a long history in the Greek community at home, as I showed in Chapter Three, but also abroad. It was the cause of a huge political upheaval within Australia a few years ago when the issue of Macedonia and its Greekness was raised. The Greek minority was up in arms at Australia’s recognition of the ex-Yugoslav state. The whole issue demonstrated how the politics of Hellenism once again has state repercussions—in the nineteenth century Greeks were able to use it to build the modern Greek state while in the 1990s the Greek minority in Australia was trying unsuccessfully to influence Australian state policy. This is where I personally see the value of Edward Said’s insight into philology as an immanently Orientalist practice. Philology, for Said, is a characteristically European episteme whose explicit object of knowledge is not Europe itself but rather some foreign element upon which philology inscribes a significance integral to its very own constitution. Orientalism thus takes on a more nuanced meaning: the reification of that which cannot submit to the logic of identity, and which, because of its resistance, must be forced to submit by being constructed as condemned to eternal exclusion. Perhaps this explains the surprise of some of my teachers at the University of Melbourne that I, a Greek, was in the English department and not in modern Greek studies and also, more insidiously, because they would never admit it, why I was not working in the vegetable and fish stalls at the market, the place where they had their encounters with Greeks. Initially, ethnos meant one’s own kind of people; then, as we saw in Chapter Three, during Byzantine times, foreigners, other people (ethnikoi). These were reclaimed as one’s own in the nineteenth century’s working of the word as its meaning returned back to its origins, now with the inclusion of otherness. Gayatri Spivak picks up on the word’s trajectory when she reminds us that the “connections between national origin and ‘ethnicity’ are, at best, dubious and, at worst, a site of violent contestation.” Yet, she continues, in the “cultural politics of the United States, they are now firmly in place without question.” She posits that the literature of ethnicity writes itself between “ethnos” and “ethnikos” and that “the displacement of the dominant must be indexed there,” in “the ‘ethnic’ writer’s signature [that] is divided against itself.” See Gayatri Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, eds. Dangerous Liaisons, pp. 481-82.

178 4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12

13 14

THE GREEK IDEA Immanuel Wallerstein, et. al., Antisystemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989), p. 21. Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p, 482. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 168. Of course, it cannot have been founded only by these two groups: that would presume an ex nihilo production of history which we know is modernity’s primary fantasy since history cannot begin entirely anew. These groups had a central role in the nation’s foundation. Both Skopetea in To Protipo Vasileio and Tsoucalas in Social Development and the State illustrate the heterogeneity of forces (and groups) that led to the founding of the Greek nation. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 75. Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 76. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1969). First published in 1849. Greek immigration in Australia dates back to 1827 and culminates with the post-WWII immigration accord that, between 1955 and 1981, brought eighty-five percent of the current six hundred and fifty thousand Greeks to Australia (Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs public records). See Report of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Office of Multicultural Affairs, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia...Sharing Our Future (Canberra: Australian Government Publication Service, 1989). See also M. Tsounis, “Pirates or Patriots? The First Greeks of Australia,” Apodimos 13, pp. 44-45. Perhaps it is the victory of the heterochthonous “Ellines” (ethnic Greeks) over the autochthonous “Elladites” (Greeks living in Greece)—which led to the conflation of ethnikos and ethnos in modern Greek—that explains the Greek state’s classification of today’s Greek-Australians as nationals. From the mid-nineteenth century, Greece has claimed its “outside’ or abroad Greeks as it own (after all, as we saw, they were instrumental in establishing it as a nation-state). “The Greek race,” writes a commentator in 1864, “is not encompassed by the narrow borders of this kingdom nor it is represented by this small topos...but is found spread in all the western world and America, in the offices of rich Greek merchants in Marseilles, London...in all of the east, in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor...in all of the marketplaces, and everywhere where there is exchange and profit” (my translation). From Chryssallis, 2 /32 (April 1864), p. 227. Cited in Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, p. 85. Report of the Committee to Review Australian Studies at the Tertiary Level, Windows Onto Worlds: Studying Australia at Tertiary Level (Canberra: Australian Government Publication Service, 1987), p. 12. In 1787 Australia was one hundred percent Aboriginal. In 1891 three point four percent was Aboriginal, eighty-six point eight Anglo-Celt,

NOTES

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16 17 18 19

20

21

179

and eight point six other European. In 1988 one percent was Aboriginal, seventy-four point six Anglo-Celt, and nineteen point three European. See Report of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. Pauline Hanson, founder of the One Nation political party, created a major stir in the national Australian media in the mid to late 1990s with her statements of racial intolerance, Anglo-Celtic Australian insularism, and economic alarmism (she blamed every economic setback on the “wogs”). Every journalist worth his or her multicultural salt was quick to condemn her and just as quick to report every single atrocity that came out of her mouth. Meant to “reassure” us that the reality and the belief in multicultural Australia had not gone by the wayside, these journalists’ reportage made Hanson from a local, Queensland phenomenon into a national “force.” (Queensland is not only known for the Great Barrier Reef, its Gold Coast and its great vacations; it is also renowned in Australia for its traditionally racist politicians, a racism that cannot be seen as accidental when one considers that Queensland has the largest population of indigenous Australians). More recently, the latest Report on multiculturalism and immigration coming out of the Prime Minister’s office practically equates immigrant and terrorist and seeks to limit the rights of the former in the name of combatting the latter. This limitation is done subtly and “within the law,” to use the central phrase of this document. See Report of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity 2003-2006 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia Publications, 2003). Report, Windows onto Worlds, p. 12. I am alluding and using Gallagher’s argument here that “the wealth of circumstantial and physical detail” that refer to nothing and “nobody in particular” should be viewed as “a confirmation, rather, than an obfuscation, of fiction,” Nobody’s Story, p.173. Jameson, “On Cultural Studies,” p. 283. David Lloyd, Anomalous States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986); Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For readings of Stevenson’s work see David Headon, Joy Hooton, Donald Horne, eds., The Abundant Culture: Meaning and Significance in Everyday Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), and Sneja Gunew, “PMT (Post modernist tensions): Reading for (multi)cultural difference,” Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley, eds., Striking Cords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992). For a discussion of Cowling’s views and his effect on Australian literary life see John Fiske, Bob Hodge, Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz (Sydney:

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Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 153. 22 A. D. Hope, “Standards in Australian Literature,” G. Johnson, ed., Australian Literary Criticism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 11. F. R. Leavis’ influence on the University of Melbourne’s English department was strong. As an undergraduate in the early 1980s I saw the last vestiges of its grip being shifted as Marxist and deconstructionist critics came to dominate the department after a quite bloody battle to which we undergraduates were bewildered witnesses. Leavis’ connection to Matthew Arnold (and through him to the Newbolt Report’s recommendations on the teaching of English in England and the colonies) has been traced by numerous critics working on the rise of English studies (as in Chapter Two, I refer the reader to Colls and Dodd, Baldick, and Hunter as examples of this work.) 23 A. D. Hope, “Standards in Australian literature,” p. 13. 24 A. D. Hope, “Standards in Australian literature,” p. 1. 25 The oral tradition of indigenous Australians, in this fiction that has Australia as a “new” country, “naturally” falls by the wayside. 26 Headon et. al., The Abundant Culture, p. xiii. 27 The institutionalization and spread of cultural studies as an academic discipline was facilitated by this new celebration of difference. I believe that any history of its life must situate itself in this context and not in the context of the history of British and American cultural studies, whose cultural and political particulars are very different from those of Australia. 28 Meaghan Morris, “On the Beach,” Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 468. 29 Morris, “On the Beach,” p. 271. 30 Sneja Gunew, A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writing (Geelong: Center for the Studies in Literary Education, 1992). 31 Sneja Gunew, “Arts for a Multicultural Australia,” Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi, eds., Culture, Difference, and the Arts (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), p. 4. 32 Antigone Kefala, European Notebook (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1988), p. 47. 33 Autoscopic and self-producing (after all an imagined community always imagines itself), this is the gist of Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Benedict Anderson in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 34 Paul Carter in Headon et. al., The Abundant Culture, p. 6. 35 Dimitri Tsaloumas, “Interview with Dimitris Tsaloumas,” Outrider 2: 2 (December 1985), p. 13. 36 Tsaloumas, “Interview with Dimitris Tsaloumas,” p. 7. 37 Con Castan, Conflicts of Love (Brisbane: Phoenix Books, 1986).

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38 For a survey of early Greek-Australian literature and its themes see George Kanarakis, The Greek Literary Presence in Australia (Athens: Institute for Modern Greek Studies, 1985). 39 Manfred Jurgensen, “Multicultural Literature.” Outrider 3: 2 (December 1986), pp. 83-84 40 Angelo Loukakis, “Homeless Again,” Outrider 3/2 (December 1986), p. 105. 41 “Homeless Again,” p. 107. 42 I have included in the brackets the quote by James Clifford that Gunew uses to explain what she means by her use of “particular” in her argument. Gunew, “PMT (Postmodernist tensions),” p. 46. 43 Nikos Papastergiadis,“The New Language,” Arena 74 (1986), p. 24. 44 Bernal, Black Athena, p. 281. 45 For a good account of the economic repercussions of Europe’s cultural interest in Greece see Mouzelis, Facets of Underdevelopment. 46 Shelley, The Last Man, p. 161. 47 Skopetea, To Protipo Vasileio, pp. 163-164. 48 Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 483. 49 Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 483. 50 Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” p. 483. 51 Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., (Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 349. 52 Interestingly, in his critique of cultural studies as an academic discipline in “On Cultural Studies” Jameson is censorious of this use of his argument about cognitive mapping and experience. 53 John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 272. 54 Virginia Nightingale, “What’s ‘ethnographic’ about ethnographic audience research?” John Frow and Meaghan Morris eds. Australian Cultural Studies (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 150. 55 Graeme Turner, “‘It Works for Me’: British Cultural Studies, Australian Cultural Studies, Australian Film,” Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 642. 56 I am not unusual in my use of my personal experience in my academic work. As Elspeth Probyn points out there is a “small industry of theorists [who] turn to themselves, their own difference, trying to explicate the world metonymically from their own.” See Elspeth Probyn, “Technologizing the Self,” in Cultural Studies, p. 202. Probyn argues that in contemporary cultural criticism this has been “stretched to the limit.” Although I agree with her, nevertheless, I believe that there is still much to be learned from the use of the personal in critical accounts of cultural practices.

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57 Simon During, “Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?” Critical Inquiry 23 (Summer 1997), p. 808. 58 Kobena Mercer, “Welcome to the jungle: Identity and diversity in postmodern politics,” J. Rutherford, ed., Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 58. 59 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” p. 349. 60 Elizabeth Jacka, “Australian cinema: An anachronism in the 1980s?” Graeme Turner, ed., Nation, Culture, Text: Australian cultural and media studies (London: Routledge, 1993). 61 Jacka, “Australian cinema,” p. 106. 62 Quoted in Jacka, “Australian cinema,” pp. 107-108. 63 Jacka, “Australian cinema,” pp. 108-110. 64 Eating meatpies and watching football were used then and are used now to invoke images of essential Australianness. The interesting thing about this slogan of essential Australianness is that its origin was an advertising slogan developed by General Motors in the 1970s in Australia to sell their cars. Inserting their message into the connotational strings which made up the stock of knowledge (already problematic in its exclusion of immigrant and Aboriginal communities) that constituted the national cultural identity of Australia, General Motors’ aim was to appeal to Australians’ sense of patriotism, hiding, in the process, its own multinational corporate identity. The slogan said “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars. They go together under the southern stars.” 65 As Meaghan Morris argues, in “On the Beach,” the culture of “ordinariness” is highly prized and, since the advent of the increasingly corporatist negotiation of culture post-1980s, highly criticized in Australia. 1 2

3 4

Conclusion

Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 73. Reflecting the cultural mood, political sentiments were at an all time high when, in 1822, 10 pamphlets supporting the liberation of Greece were published in England alone, 23 in Germany and 15 in France. The previous year only 2 pamphlets were published in England, 14 in Germany and 16 in France. Harris Booras, Hellenic Independence and America’s Contribution to the Cause (VA: Rutland, 1934), p. 373. In this book, Booras compares European and American enthusiasm and funding for Greek Independence. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p.183. Anderson writes: “My short-sighted assumption then [in the first

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodore 152 Ahmad, Aijaz 10, 48-49, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 158 Auerbach, Eric 26, 48, 150 Alexander, the Great 65, 79-81, 85, 89, 93-94, 167, 168, 170, 171 Anderson, Benedict 47, 91, 139, 146, 157, 171, 180, 182-183 Appadurai, Arjun 47, 139, 146, 157, 183 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 36, 152 Arnold, Matthew 5, 9, 51-52, 115, 124, 145, 158, 159, 180 Australia and: Europe 13; Greek Australians 12, 41, 46, 108, 111-112, 114, 157, 177, 178; Hellenism 12 -13, 41, 107-108, 111, 114; migrants 113-114, 130-132, 134-135; minority writing 116-121, 180, 181; multiculturalism 13, 41, 119125 Australian Government Reports: National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia 178,179; Windows onto Worlds 113-114, 117, 179

autochthonism 18, 85-88, 97, 121, 181, 178-179 autoethnography 10, 181

Balibar, Etienne 100-101, 172, 173, 174, 175 Balkans 81, 86, 93, 110 Barthes, Roland 16, 147 Benjamin, Walter 15, 17, 147, Bennett, Bruce 117 Berlant, Lauren 179 Bernal, Martin 50, 52, 144, 154, 158, 160, 161, 164, 181 Bhabha, Homi 1, 11, 16, 20, 26, 28, 31, 33-38, 98, 124, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 179, 183 Bhatt, Chetan 176 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 159 Blumenberg, Hans 2, 28, 90, 143, 151, 171 Byron, Lord George Gordon 11, 47, 58, 62-67, 70, 75, 157, 161, 163, 164 Byzantium 39, 53-54, 80-81, 86, 89-90, 95, 159, 170 Calotychos, Vangelis 171

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Castan, Con 120, 122, 180 Chambers, Ian 9, 146 Chandler, Richard 57-58, 161 Chatterjee, Partha 179, 180 Chouliaras, Yiorgos ix, x, 167, 175 Christianity and: secularism 2; modern Greece 86-90, 93, 95 Christopoulos, Dimitris 175-176 citizenship ix, 12, 84-86, 95-102, 107, 134-135, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 civility 12, 19-20, 56, 68, 124 Clarke, Edward 157 Clarke, G.W. 148, 157, 158 classicism 23-24, 44, 57, 65, 67, 69, 161, 165, Classics 4, 50-52, 69, 74-76, 115, 121, 123, 144 Constantine, David 54, 157 continuity 2, 6, 20, 26, 39-40, 53, 66-67, 80-81, 84-85, 88-91, 93, 109, 121, 164, 167 cosmopolitanism 10, 40, 101, 136-137, 146, 173-174, 175 cultural translation 108, 122-125, 127-129, 134-137 Davis, Lennard 161, 162 de Certeau, Michel 20, 25-26, 71, 148, 150, 165 Demetriou, Kyriakos 167, 168, 170, 171, Derrida, Jacques 20, 140, 148, 182 diaspora ix, 9-10, 86-87, 97, 110 11, 122,128, 171 Dimaras, K. Th. 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174 Dirlik, Arif 34, 152, 153 displacement 4, 9, 13, 40, 49, 70, 75, 87, 112m 132, 146, 150, 157, 172, 178 Donoghue, William 163 Durell, Lawrence 3, 4, 47

Eisner, Robert 57, 155, 160, 161 Elgin, Lord 64 Enlightenment 27, 30-35, 38-40, 140, 144-145, 148, 152, 170 ethnic 10, 33, 40, 46-47, 86, 91, 93, 97-98, 101, 108-109, 111 114, 116, 118-122, 129-130, 134, 137, 170, 176, 177, 178 ethnikos 107, 109, 114, 177, 178 Eurocentrism 5, 73, 127, 164 Europe 4, 12-13, 19-21, 27-28, 37, 39-40, 44. 50, 53, 63, 69, 72, 83, 87, 89, 94-95, 111, 113, 115, 123, 127, 139, 150, 158, 167, 175, 177, 181, 183 (see also Australia and Europe; Greece and Europe) everyday life 19, 22-23, 25, 41, 46, 108, 116-117, 129, 148-149 exile ix, 10, 49 Fallmerayer, Jacob 40, 90-91, 171 Ferraios, Rhigas 91-95, 98-99, 172, 173, 174 Foucault, Michel 1, 2, 22, 29, 32, 35, 90, 143, 148, 152, 163, 166 Freud, Sigmund 3-4, 96, 144 Frow, John 149, 181

Gallagher, Catherine 60-61, 161, 162,163, 179 Galt, John 47, 63, 123, 157,163 Gardiner, Michael 149 Gilpin, William 164 globalization 7, 41, 100, 157, 185 Goldsmith, Steven 70, 72-73, 75, 165, 166 Gorgon 79-81, 88, 93, 105 Gourgouris, Stathis 26, 28, 37, 39 40, 83, 144, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158, 164, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 183 Great Idea 86, 94, 99

INDEX Greece and: citizenship 12, 84-87, 97-102, 169, 176; civility 12, 20; colonialism 6, 28, 150, 168; migration 87, 98, 107, 110, 112, 124; minorities 101-102, 111; minority education 101-102, 175-176; modernity 2, 6-8, 11, 15-19, 21-23, 31-33, 88-90; modernization 7, 145; myth 16 19, 20, 24, 79, 82, 147; orientalism 26-29; realism 4, 20, 43-44, 46, 48, 50, 53, 55-57, 60-62, 67, 77, 147; the everyday 20-24, 129 ; transnationalism 42, 91-95 ; travel 52, 154-155; utopia 3; West 8, 10; world history 23, 94-95 Greek-Australians (see Australia) Greekness 9, 11, 40, 81-82, 85-86, 94, 97, 107, 108, 110, 159, 168, 171, 177 Grimal, Pierre 147 Guha, Ranajit 95, 173 Gunew, Sneja 118, 121-122, 180, 181

Halsband, Robert 155, 156,160, 161 Hegel, G.W. 92-95, 104, 172, 175 Hellenism and: Australia (see Australia and Hellenism); cosmopolitanism 10-11, 13, 136; criticism 4-5, 9-10, 40-41, 114, 165; Eurocentrism 4, 9 10,16, 74-75, 89-90, 107, 114, 164; philology 4, 50-52, 144, 151; transnationalism 4, 12, 110, 114 Herghenhan, Laurie 116, 118 Herzfeld, Michael 145, 160, 161, 193 Hill, Aaron 53, 54, 56, 59, 159, 160 Hobhouse, John 65, 66, 67, 163

211

Homer 35, 43-44, 56-58, 60, 72, 74, 156, 161 homogeneis 86-87, 97, 99-100, 110-111, 170, 175, 176 homogeneity 85, 91, 98, 100, 107 Hope, A.D. 115, 117, 180, Horkheimer, Max 152, 173 Hume, David 61, 162 Hunter, Ian 159, 180 Hunter, J. Paul 162 Iliou, Fillipos 169

Jacka, Elizabeth 131, 182 Jameson, Fredric 4-6, 8, 16, 125, 128-130, 136, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 153, 181, 182 Jenkyns, Richard 165 Johnson, Barbara 70, 72, 75, 165 Johnson, Samuel 53 Jurgensen, Manfred 121, 122, 181 Jusdanis, Gregory 40, 145

Kant, Immanuel 96, 100-15, 148, 175, 176, Kaplan, Caren 8, 52, 146, 151, 152, 154, 157, 159 Kaplan, Robert 6, 145 Karakasidou, Anastasia 168 Kefala, Antigone 118-119, 122, 180 Kimball, Roger 148 Kitromilidis, Paschalis 167, 172 Knolles, Richard 53-54, 56, 59, 66, 159 Korais, Adamantios 82-84, 163, 168, 169 Koselleck, Reinhart 20, 30, 146, 148, 150, 151 Lacan, Jacques 48, 152 Laertius, Diogenes 10-11, 13, 146 Leavis, F. R. 124, 180

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Lefebvre, Henri 11, 15, 18-25, 28 29, 65, 67, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150 Leontis, Artemis 3, 40, 159 Levi-Strauss, Claude 16 Lew, Joseph 156 Liakos, Antonis 89, 171 Lloyd, David 4, 33, 144, 148, 152, 179 Loomba, Ania 146 Loukakis, Angelo 121, 181 Lowe, Lisa 156

MacLean, Gerald ix, 155, 157 Malkin, Irad 168 Marshall, David 164 Marxism 1, 6-7, 20, 22, 24, 37-38, 75, 104, 143, 145, 149, 160, 166-167, 169 Mbembe, Achille 152 McKeon, Michael 60, 161 Mellor, Anne 69, 75, 165, Mercer, Kobena 128, 182 Meschonic, Henri 30, 151 migration 32, 87, 102, 108, 113, 120, 128, 129, 139, 174, 175 Mill, J.S. 158-159, 169, 172 Millman, Richard 150 minorities 96, 101, 140, 174, 175, 176 minority education 102 minority writing 123 (see also Australia and minority writing) modernity 1-3; modernity and: Christianity 2, 88-89; continuity 2, 8, 11, 16, 23, 28, 39, 88-90, 94, 114, 164; new times 1-2, 29 31; postcolonialism 1-3, 20, 25 26, 28-29, 31-39; secularism 2 modernization 6-7, 39, 123, 145, 154 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 146 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 11,

43-47, 50, 52-62, 66, 75, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163 Morris, Meaghan 117, 180-182 Mouzelis, Nikos 6-7, 145, 181 Mufti, Aamir 150, 151, 152, 178 multiculturalism 6, 13, 20, 41, 107, 109, 112-114, 116-117, 119, 121, 123-125, 127, 144, 146, 154, 159, 175, 179 (see also Australia and multiculturalism) myth 3, 15-20, 25, 26, 79, 81, 82, 93, 147, 156, 171, 172

nation 130, 169, 173, 174, 183 Neohellenism 16, 39, 40, 82-83, 90, 91, 94 New Australian 120, 146 new times 1, 29-31, 33-35 Newbolt Report 52, 159, 180 Nightingale, Virginia 126, 181 nomad 9 nostalgia 35-37, 46-47 Nussbaum, Martha 84

Oedipus 15-19, 80, 81, 147, 148 Orientalism 11-12, 20, 26-29, 39, 44-50, 59, 62, 66-67, 69, 71, 133, 144, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158, 160, 177 Osborne, Peter 34, 143, 149, 152 Ovid 75, 166 Paparrigopoulos, Konstantinos 87-95, 109, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174 Papastergiadis, Nikos 122, 124, 125, 181 Parry, Benita 152, 153 Pausanias 17, 57, 59, 147, 148 Philhellenism and: nationalism 89; orientalism 44-48, 57, 59, 66 67, 71; Neohellenism 63, 80, 164; tradition 68; Englishness

INDEX 57, 64-66, 74, 76, 123, 158 picturesque 59, 164 philology 4, 27, 32, 33, 69, 90, 144, 169; and anthropology 32 33, 151; and orientalism 177 politics of location 8, 146, 152, 154 Pope, Alexander 43, 55, 56, 60 postcolonial theory 3, 25, 31, 32, 34, 39, 41, 121, 137, 152 postcolonialism 6, 39, 105, 136, 153 postmodernity 1, 37, 49, 146, 153, 157 Prakash, Gyan 32, 151 Pratt, Mary Louise 157, 158 Probyn, Elspeth 182

re-occupation 2, 28, 29 realism 11, 43, 48, 52, 60, 61, 62, 124, 162, 163 Renan, Ernest 167 Revett, Nicholas 58, 161 Riedel, Manfred 103-104, 176, 177 rights 91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179 Robbins, Bruce 10, 144, 146, 165 Romanticism 23-25, 48, 65-67, 70, 158, 164 Rosaldo, Renato 36, 152 Rose, Mark 76, 162 Ross, Andrew 144, 165 Roudomentof, Victor 170, 172

Said, Edward 11, 20, 26-28, 45-46, 48-50, 53, 56, 69, 75, 144, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158, 160, 177 Sassen, Saskia 173, 174, 175 secularism 26, 51, 89, 93, 140, 151 Seth, Sanjay 149 Shelley, Mary 11, 68-70, 73-76, 123, 165, 166, 167, 173, 181

213

Shelley, Percy Byssche 9, 70, 139, 163 Skopetea, Elli 123, 169, 170, 172, 173, 178, 179, 181 Slavs 91, 99 Sophocles 18, 147, 148 Spencer, Terence 53, 157, 159, 160, 161 Sphinx 53, 157, 159, 160, 161 Spivak, Gayatri ix, 5, 25, 31, 37, 39, 41, 49, 102, 103-104, 109, 121, 125, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158, 166, 167, 173, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183 Stocking, Jr, George 151, 168, 169 Stuart, James 58, 161 Sublime 37 sympathy 61, 120, 162, 163, 165

Theocritus 43, 44, 56, 57, 61, 62 tradition 2, 4, 19, 21, 30, 56, 68, 84, 108, 112, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 131, 145, 147, 167, 180 transnational identity 12 transnational literacy 125, 144 transnationalism 3-4, 8, 11-12, 40 41, 47, 93, 95-96, 101, 107, 114, 125, 139, 144, 173 travel 3-4,11, 43-45, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 65-66, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163 Trelawny, Edward John 65, 163 Tsaloumas, Dimitris 119, 181 Tsitselikes, Konstantinos 174, 176 Tsoucalas, Konstantinos 84, 87, 145, 167, 169, 170, 178 Turner, Brian 51, 158 Turner, Graeme 127, 180, 181, 182 utopia 19, 24-25, 32, 36-37, 70

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Veremis, Thanos 90, 167, 171, 172 Vernant, Jean Paul 17, 147 Virgil 75, 166 Wakefield Project 112, 123 Walcott, Derek 8 Warner, Marina 16, 147 Watt, Ian 60 West 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 20, 22, 26 27, 32-33, 35, 38-40, 47-48, 52 53, 69-70, 90, 97, 110, 140, 145, 148 Williams, Raymond 5, 54, 149 Wood, Alfred 155, 159 Wood, Robert 57, 161 world history 89, 92, 94, 95, 172, 173 Zakynthinos, D. A. 170, 172, 174 Zizek, Slavoj 36, 152, 158