Greek Literature on Shifting Ground: Nationalism, Migration, and Belonging in the Modern Greek Literary Sphere

Speaker: Karen Emmerich (Princeton University) 

Respondent: Nicholas J. Dames (Columbia University)

This talk will give the outlines of a book in the making, which investigates the ways in which a number of individuals writing in Greek from the time of the revolution onward have been either coopted into or excluded from conversations regarding “Greekness,” and likewise included in or excluded from the shifting category of Greek legal citizen. By placing recent mass migrations to and through Greece along a broader historical arc—an arc that includes a number of other migrations that involved individuals, including “Pontic Greeks” and “Asia Minor Greeks'' collectively conceived of as “returning” to their “proper” homeland—we can begin to de-naturalize distinctions between recent and less recent arrivals, and consider more fully the ways in which notions of national belonging have always actively embraced some while pointedly excluding others. Case studies include Dionysios Solomos, C. P. Cavafy, Mimika Kranaki, Ilias Venezis, and others.

In collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI)