Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Андонис Љакос: ИСТОРИСКОТО ВРЕМЕ И НАЦИОНАЛНИОТ ПРОСТОР ВО МОДЕРНА ГРЦИЈА


2. REGIONAL HISTORIES

2.3 Narratives of Nostalgia
Nostalgia as a component of thinking of time and space, is a recent preoccupation of historians after the turn of memory in 1990 (…). Nostalgia, the sense of trauma, the history of loss and disturbing memories, are another hidden agenda in the writing of national histories. In Greece, this traumatic history was constructed around the concept of disaster, using the Greek word ‘catastrophe’. The Asia Minor Catastrophe, Mikrasiatiki Katastrophi became a memory landmark, a chronotope, for Greek after 1922. Indeed, between 1922 and 1923, a massive influx of 1,500.000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor, Eastern Trace and the southern coast of the Black Sea streamed into Greece, increasing the population by fifth. This forced migration was the final result of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the decade of Greek-Turkish War (1912-22) (…). The refugees were dispersed throughout Greece carrying with them histories and memories of massacres, dislocations, deprivations, deportations, famine and long walks from the interior Anatolia to the coast and from the Eastern Trace to Greece. After spending the first few years trying to survive in their new places in Greece, they started to recreate their community life along the lines of their regional provenance. Throughout Greece, the names of their former villages and towns appeared prefixed with the word ‘New’, such as Nea Ionia, Nea Peramos, Nea Philadelphia to name but a few (…). Refugees’ associations, common holy places and feasts, sporting associations and small journals have created an imaginary map of the ‘lost homelands’. Greek Anatolian evacuees reemerged throughout the regions of the Greek state and a new regionalism, unifying these dispersed communities acquired the status of collective framework of refugee identity. They developed a narrative of pain, suffering and mourning of loss, which became another topos in Greek literature and historiography (…). As it was the case with other Greek regions, the refugees tried to incorporate their narrative into the national narrative. Under the impact of the international discourse on genocide and the Holocaust, the refugee narrative was reshaped around these concepts at the end of the twentieth century. The imaginary regionalism of this population has survived the post-World War II migration to northwestern Europe, Canada and Australia, creating international associations which run along the lines of their regional provenance, such as the Pontic associations for the people from the southern coast of the Black Sea. As a consequence, imaginary regionalism has acquired the dimension of a diaspora. In South East Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean there are crossing diasporas, which have constructed an imaginary geography, mental and mnemonic map. This map is a consequence of the wars and the turbulent history of the area and the movement of the populations across the borders.


3. NATIONAL HISTORY AND DIASPORA
The myth of Ulysses is the big bang of Mediterranean mythologies because of the overlapping diasporas around this sea. The Jewish, Greek and Phoenician diasporas were the classical and typical cases in antiquity. New diasporas formed as a result of the dissolutions of empires, the creation of national states along the shore of their Mediterranean and the impact of the economic and social reorganization of the world in the nineteenth an twentieth centuries. The age of nationalism in the Mediterranean was characterized by the mass exodus of the Christian population from Asia Minor to Greece, of Muslim from Balkans to Turkey, of the Slav-speaking population from Greece to Bulgaria, and also by Jewish migration to Palestine, the migration of Palestinians to surrounding Arab countries, and by the mass departure of Europeans from Egypt and Lebanon and French citizens from Algeria. Mediterranean migration has also resulted from economic change in Europe and the Mediterranean has experienced  four mass migration movements in the last two centuries. The first was from the Northern to the Southern Mediterranean at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of colonisation of North Africa. The second was the transatlantic migration to North and South America. The third movement was the post-war migration from Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia to Northern and Western Europe, while the fourth is ongoing and irregular mass migration from postcolonial Arab countries and post-socialist Eastern European states (…).
Ulysses became the self-mirroring myth of Greece because migration and diaspora have been considered a constant feature of Greek history. As a topos of a national historiography, diaspora implies a disassociation between territory, state and nation. This dislocation is in juxtapostition to the systematization of these elements by the national state. In terms of the discourse of the diaspora, the subject is not the Greek nation but Hellenism. Both terms are diffuse as a clear definition would crystallise an undesired difference, for both parties. In contrast, the unity and unanimity between fatherland and the diaspora is underlined. The difference is that the concept of nation implies a strong emphasis, civic bonds and the state. On the other hand, the concept of Hellenism is used as a non-territorial conception of nationhood that is comprised of the metropolis and the diaspora , giving a strong emphasis to the cultural aspects of the national identity. For this reason, the historical culture of the Greek diaspora is particularly sensitive and intransigent in matters related to nationalistic issues, cultural legacies and identity politics.
Diaspora is itself a construction of the national historiography which has homogenised separate migration movement, with different motivation, in various parts of the world and at different times. Beneath this cultural over-determination exist a multiplicity of voices regarding the past in autobiographies, novels and local histories of the diaspora. This multiplicity has the potential to introduce peripheral outlooks and complex articulation to the monolinearity of national history. The concept of diaspora is central in understanding the multiple frameworks in which the concept of region and regionalism has been inscribed. If we accept that space is not only a geographical term but also a historical and cultural construction, imaginary places of identification such as diaspora belong in equal terms to this cultural geography (…).

4. THE BALKAN AND MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT
Does the Balkan or Mediterranean region work as a wider framework for a supranational Modern Greek identity? The response depends on the uses of these wider regional identities, the meaning with which they are loaded and the discourses within which they have bee contextualized.

4.1. The Balkans
The term Balkans, encompassing the European part of the Ottoman Empire and the Christian nations competing for its spoils, was imposed on the region in the late nineteenth century. A constellation of negative meanings was constructed around this term and the term balkanisation came to be used as a synonym of compartmentalization, fragmentation and conflict (…). Given this negativity, Modern Greek history and culture refused to be defined as Balkan historiography, considering itself as the modern sequel to Classical and Byzantine. Between the pigeon holes of time and space, the first provided greater opportunities for recognition and respectability (…).
The Ottoman past was another reason why there was no room for categorising Greek ideology under the umbrella term of the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire and its legacy were the more recent and visible past shared by all Balkan nations. However, the nationalisation in the Balkans presupposed the rejection of this common past (…). On the other hand, was a common past of a Balkan brotherhood possible? What was considered as a victory and success for the one Balkan nation was described as a defeat for the other, and vice versa. For instance, what is mourned as the Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greek history is celebrated as the Day of Independence in Turkey. The division of the Balkans during the Cold War and the subsequent differing pace of Balkan societies deepened the division of the area. Wishing to be recognised as a European, the Balkan nations turn their backs on the term Balkans and Balkanism in the belief that the concept Balkan and Europe were not complementary but self-exclusionary (…). In his official speech during his state visit to France on 24 November 1994, appealed to President Francois Mitterand, to ‘Make us Europeans quickly if you don’t want to become Balkans’ (…). In his appeal, the internalisation of the difference between the Balkans and Europe is described with a self-sarcastic metaphor of an infection. Although his statement came during the Yugoslav crisis and the enormous difficulties of the Bulgarian post-communist economy, Balkan nations still envision their mutual relation to Western Europe not as a collective effort but as an individual and exclusively asymmetric relationship. As the prejudice towards Balkans were turned into an internalised negative consciousness, turn bottom-up, was transformed into a Balkan self-irony, which gave a sense of regional communality through cinema and popular music. In the 1990’s, Balkan was imaginary region for Greek cinema. The well-known film of Theo Angelopoulos, ‘Gaze of Ullyses’, was encompassing Balkans instead of travelling to the Mediterranean sea (…).


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