PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
Friday, May 6, 2016
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Abstract
EU Citizenship and the Making of a European Periphery: A Case Study of Greek-African Marriages in the Netherlands
The dramatic rise of unemployment in crisis-hit Greece has caused a new emigration stream towards Northern European countries. This paper examines a particular aspect of the New Greek emigration: the growing number of mixed marriages between Greek female citizens and legally precarious African migrants in the Netherlands. According to Amsterdam’s marriage registry, the last few years saw a noticeable shift in the marital choices of West African (Nigeria, Ghana) male migrants in the Netherlands from Dutch citizen spouses of various ethnic origins to EU citizen spouses from Southern Europe, especially Greece, and Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Firstly, this paper analyzes the legal context in which Greek citizens in the Netherlands became desirable spouses for African migrants. A number of recent decisions by the European Court of Justice led to a more liberal interpretation of Community Law enabling unauthorized migrants to legalize their stay in a member-state through a marriage with an EU citizen. While a marriage with a Dutch citizen is regulated by the very strict Dutch legislation, a marriage with a non-Dutch EU citizen, such as a Greek, is regulated by Community Law, which permits the immediate legalization of the migrant spouse.
Secondly, my research examines why African male migrants in the Netherlands particularly opt for Greek women and women from the European periphery and not for any other EU citizen, such as Germans. Anthropological studies of transnational marriages have pointed out the power discrepancies between spouses and the strong dependency of the immigrant spouse on her/his citizen spouse. My research shows that African migrants in the Netherlands navigate the highly asymmetrical dynamic of mixed-status marriage by choosing, as partners, Greek citizens, or other peripheral Europeans, who are EU citizens but most of them are working class migrants and in a similar structural position in Dutch society (i.e. they live in the same working class neighborhoods, work in the same low-skilled sectors and are negatively portrayed in public discourses). Under these conditions, the exchange of resources, money, emotions and sexual pleasure between spouses results into a more reciprocal dependency.
The case of Greek-African marriages in the Netherlands offers an unexpected point of entry for the study of two simultaneous and contradictory developments in the EU and the place of Greece within it. On the one hand, the rights claimed through these marriages show that the EU has gone further than the founding common market principle and moved towards becoming a polity which protects and grants rights to its mobile citizens. On the other hand, the migratory trajectories of new Greek migrants and their disadvantaged position in Dutch society, which turns them into preferable spouses, illustrate that the European debt crisis reconfigured power relations within the EU and made crisis-hit members subordinate peripheries of Northern Europe. The empirical data presented in this paper were collected through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, Greece and Ghana, which included interviews with Greek women and their African husbands as well as participant observation in the places they live, work and socialize.
Bio
Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a BA degree in Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies from the University of Macedonia and an MA degree in Migration and Ethnic Studies from the University of Amsterdam. His PhD has been supported with a four-year fellowship by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and a grant by the A.G. Leventis Foundation and his MA with a scholarship by the Foundation for Education and European Culture (IPEP). His dissertation examines how legally unauthorized West African migrants use kinship to access scarce civic resources in a changing Europe. His research, particularly, examines the complex conditions under which Greek women, and other women from the European periphery, recently became preferable spouses for many African male migrants in the Netherlands who have been granted a residence permit on the basis of their marriage with an EU citizen. An article based on this research received the 2015 Bennetta Jules-Rosette Graduate Student Award by AfAA, American Anthropological Association.
Abstract
John III Vatatzes redivivus. Creating one of the Roots of Modern Greek Identity
The Nicene sovereign John III Vatatzes (1222-1254) is the only Byzantine emperor besides Constantine the Great (306-337) still venerated by the Orthodox Church. Considered by some a “father of the Greeks”, he is present today in Greek political and cultural debates, as is demonstrated by various allusions to his possible return in the form of the legendary “petrified emperor”, a legend in which he takes the place more commonly given to Constantine XI (1449-1453), the last emperor of Byzantium.
His contemporary resonance must be understood also in the reference to the highly-debated context of imperial sainthood – a critical topic in the study of Byzantine civilization – and of the survival and re-shaping of Greek identity from the Middle Ages to the modern world.
Through the study of “hagio-biographical” texts on this peculiar figure, as well as a general survey of the available sources on him (not only literary works but also manuscript evidence), I show how Vatatzes came to be “canonized” – in the fluid, Byzantine sense of the term – and reveal that his cult took shape in two different moments and for very different reasons.
Having laid the background for my research through innovative critical editions, with extensive commentaries, of the “hagio-biographical” dossier concerning John III (namely: George of Pelagonia’s Βίος τοῦ ἁγίου Ἰωάννου βασιλέως τοῦ Ἐλεήμονος, from mid-fourteenth century; the anonymous Βίος τοῦ ἁγίου βασιλέως Ἰωάννου τοῦ Βατάτση τοῦ Ἐλεήμονος το ῦἐν Μαγνησίᾳ, and Nikodemos the Hagiorite’s Μνήμη τοῦ ἁγίου, ἐνδόξου, θεοστέπτου βασιλέως Ἰωάννου Βατάτση τοῦ Ἐλεήμονος, τοῦ ἐν Μαγνησίᾳ, the latter two both written at some point during the Ottoman empire and referring in some way to the province of Asia Minor), I use their texts in order to offer a redefinition of the place of John Vatatzes’ worship in the more general framework of late- and post-Byzantine civilization. Exploring the effects of this phenomenon in the longue durée, I privilege an approach which takes into account the more general point of view of social history.
My paper will summarize the main results of this multidisciplinary research. Even if it arose from local and popular fervor around his burial site in the monastery of Sosandra, the sanctioned cult of John III as a saint-emperor, as I will demonstrate, was a post-Byzantine phenomenon that emerged only in the context of the Ottoman empire; it was most likely linked to the history of Greek communities in the Hermus valley (the original base of that Nicene emperor’s power in Asia Minor) and in Smyrna region, and connected to the tension between the center and the periphery that emerged in the seventeenth century Orthodox Christian world.
Moving from the demonstration of the autography of John III’s Life manuscript and passing through the post-Byzantine dynamics that made him one of the symbols of modern Greek identity, I will offer new evidence of this phenomenon which includes, even in the present day, such newspaper headlines as a recently-spotted “Vatatzes in front of Constantinople gate”!
Bio
Lorenzo M. Ciolfi is a Ph.D. candidate at the EHESS – Centre d’Etudes Byzantines, Néo-Helléniques et Sud-Est Européennes, Paris (advisor: Prof. P. Odorico) and is now affiliated with New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, as International Fellow.
After completion of his undergraduate studies in philology and Greek palaeography at Sapienza – University of Rome on the manuscript traditions of Demosthenes’ and Lucian's corpora from Antiquity to the mid-Byzantine era (advisors: Profs. G. Cavallo and D. Bianconi), gaining expertise which he applies to the translation of classical as well as early modern Greek and Latin texts into Italian, he is concentrating on the figure and role of John III Vatatzes in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras, with particular attention to the question of the emergence of his cult within the framework of Byzantine imperial sainthood.
In parallel, he is working on Greek paremiographic collections in XV and XVI centuries, and their relationship with the developments of Western proverb anthologies (with a special focus on Apostolis’ Violarium and Erasmus’ Adagia).
Since 2012, he is on the editorial staff of the international Byzantine e-journal Porphyra.
Abstract
The Longs and Shorts of an Emergent Nation: Nikolaos Loukanes’s 1526 Iliad and the Unprosodic New Trojans
Intellectually rich and editorially innovative the quattrocento period, along with the ensuing years of the early sixteenth century, ushered in an era of profound ideological ferment gradually culminating in a precocious conceptualization of a national Neo-Hellenic identity. Seen through this prism the first printed rendition of the Iliad in a modern language, which is undertaken in 1526 by Nikolaos Loukanes, calls for a meticulous and thorough analysis, since perusing it and paying close attention to the fixed epithets allotted by our author to the Achaeans and the Trojans one cannot fail to observe that the treatment of the two contending armies is anything but dispassionate.
Given the flagrant deviation of Loukanes’s account from both the Homeric original and Constantine Hermoniakos’s earlier paraphrase of the Iliad (fourteenth century), from which the young author borrows profusely in certain sections of his work, the question naturally arises: Why is Loukanes so willing to depict Homer’s megathumoi (great-hearted) Trojans as inherently kakoi (evil), adikoi (unjust), barbaroi (barbarous), and apistoi (faithless) while at the same time being remarkably unstinting in his praise of Achaean valor? Is he wittingly investing the Trojan legend with an inchoate national sentiment? Does his view of the present color his perception of the past? And, why do the inhabitants of the famed fortress-town of Hisarlik in his work bear an uncanny resemblance to the Ottoman Turks, who by the beginning of the sixteenth century were rapidly entrenching themselves in Europe? In gauging the possible motives underpinning the author’s metaphrastic choices, we will attempt to elucidate the significance of theories developed already in Medieval Times, and widely revived later on, during the Renaissance Period, regarding the origins of the Turks, and the alleged association of the latter with the Trojans. Harking back to the late seventh century the story of the Turks’ alleged Trojan origins had its roots in a Latin chronicle which is commonly ascribed to a fictitious author, Fredegar.
Despite the fact that Fredegar’s tale was largely eclipsed by subsequent chronicles, the semi-dormant theory of the Trojan pedigree of the Turks held on tenaciously until the Renaissance. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), whose treatises are brimming with reproaches against those who irresponsibly referred to the Turks as Teucri, the name by which the Trojans were widely known in the West through Virgil’s Aeneid, offers ample evidence of the considerable popularity the notion enjoyed still in the middle of the fifteenth century.
More than an innocuous slip of the tongue, the interchangeable use of the phonetically resembling ethnonyms Tourkoi and Teucri could be attributed to both the humanist penchant for accomplishingan authentic antique style devoid ofneologisms, and to the identity of the Turks’ power base in Asia Minor. The main aim of this paper will be to explore the fascinating way in which Loukanes responds to these theories through his intriguing recapturing of the hoary heritage of Homer.
Bio
Calliopi Dourou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Greek Literature and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Classics at Harvard University. She received her A.B. in Philology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and her M.A. in Classics from Tufts University. Her doctoral dissertation conducted under the supervision of professor Panagiotis Roilos seeks to fully explore the untapped hermeneutic potentials of Nikolaos Loukanes’s 1526 rendering of the Iliad. Her main research interests embrace, but are not limited to, the following topics: early Modern Greek literature, reception of the classics in post-Byzantine Literature, Renaissance Hellenism, cultural history of early Modern Europe, translation theory, visual culture, and textual criticism.
Abstract
Producing and Consuming Greek Books in Renaissance Italy and France: A Comparative Analysis of Collecting Practices and Cultural Identities
Following the fall of Constantinople, the renewal of Greek studies in Western Europe led scholars to seek out texts, both manuscript and printed. Many Greek manuscripts came to the West in Greek-style bookbindings, which soon started being imitated, sometimes very closely, sometimes loosely, in Venice, Rome, and France. This paper will look at scholarly and technical practices related to the production and consumption of Greek books in Renaissance Europe, from the unique perspective offered by the craft of bookbindings.
The material culture of the collecting of Greek books in Europe was permeated with cultural and political subtexts. Many bibliophiles had volumes bound in the Greek style simply because of the refined elegance and luxury they emanated. In Venice and France, however, the patrician élite and the royals actively researched such objects also for the message they conveyed, namely that the Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of France were the cultural heirs to the throne of Byzantium, unjustly held by the Ottoman Sultan. Cultural motives were thus employed to reinforce claims originally made on an economic and political basis. This paper will offer a comparative analysis of two case studies. Firstly, a group of bookbindings made at the expense of young Venetian patricians in the 1510s at the request of their teacher, the Greek Marcus Musurus; and secondly, the hellenised material culture and the production of Greek-style bindings in France.
These case studies clearly illustrate how differences in material aspects, such as structures and materials, mirror different approaches, despite serving similar functions. The Greek-style bindings made for the “Eupatrides”, as Musurus called his students, were fairly close to their Byzantine models both in techniques and decorative practices, which was common in Venice. The dedications inscribed by Musurus on the endleaves in an elegant Attic prose praised the Eupatrides as models of virtues esteemed by Classical Greek and Early Modern Venetian cultures alike. On the other hand, Charles VIII was depicted in “Byzantine accoutrements” around the same time as a prophecy circulated announcing the coming of one Charles, son of a father by the same name, who would subjugate continental Europe and become King of the Greeks. In 1519 Francis I founded a collège for Greek students in Milan, and in 1540 Etienne Roffet, the relieur du roi, started producing Greek-style bindings. The hundreds of Greek-style bookbindings produced in Paris and Fontainebleau, which were initially very genuine in their structures, soon began to diverge from their models to adopt French techniques and decorative languages. Books in Latin and the vernacular were also bound in this hybrid style.
In this paper, I will adopt a comparative approach to delineate points of contact and divergences between these two historical narratives. By looking at material culture and collecting practices in the context of wider cultural and intellectual frameworks, I hope to demonstrate that they expressed historical narratives of translatio imperii, which were looked favorably upon, or actively enacted by, the ruling class.
Bio
Anna Gialdini holds a BA and MA in Classical Studies from the University of Milan, as well as a degree in Archival Science and Palaeography from the State Archive of Milan. She has also studied at the Université de Strasbourg and Ca' Foscari University in Venice. Her PhD at the Ligatus Research Centre (University of the Arts London) focuses on the reinterpretation and appropriation of Byzantine binding techniques in Renaissance Venice, from a material culture and intellectual history perspective.
Her research interests also include the book trade in the Mediterranean, specialist markets, and the place of the history of bookbinding in interdisciplinary historical research. She is currently co-authoring a study of archival bindings and materiality of recordkeeping practices in late Medieval Sicily.
Her research has been funded by the Fondazione Fedrigoni – ISTOCARTA, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Bibliographical Society of America.
Abstract
Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora
For four generations, the Anatolian Greek immigrant community of Lynn, Massachusetts has preserved a remarkable complex of cosmopolitan musical practices rooted in the multiethnic and multicultural society of turn-of-the-twentieth century Ottoman Anatolia. Using a variety of media, including transcriptions of Greek parlor songs, Ottoman wine-house music, and European ballroom dances; commercial 78 rpm records; home recordings on reel-to-reel tape; and live musical performances, members of this community have consistently engaged with diverse repertoires and modes of musical expression. Such creative mediation between different cultural formations has been central to Anatolian Greek ideas about their place in the larger narrative of life in the Greek diaspora for centuries, and has taken on added importance since the traumatic transition to a post-Ottoman world in the wake of the second Greco-Turkish War and the ensuing Megali Katastrofi (Great Catastrophe) of the early 1920s.
To examine these processes of cosmopolitan mediation between different cultural formations in the musical practices of one Anatolian Greek migrant family over the last century, I suggest that we consider two related concepts from ancient Greek song-culture: the Homeric idea of mūthos (after classicist Richard Martin, the traditional narratives that convey a society's truth-values) and Aristotle's notion of mimēsis (in Gregory Nagy's interpretation, the performative re-enactment of mūthos). These formulations are ideally suited to the diachronic study of a multimedia performance tradition such as that of Anatolian Greeks from Lesvos, and will help us to understand this modern Greek song-culture's take on difference, trauma, and their cathartic, musically-enacted resolution. Through detailed analysis of selected historical transcriptions, home recordings, and live performances, I demonstrate in this paper how this remarkably cosmopolitan tradition has consistently harnessed the creative power of cultural difference – the cornerstone of this culture's particular mūthos – through acts of performative mimēsis in order to define itself and its practitioners according to an expansive view of their place in the Greek diaspora and the wider world.
Bio
Panayotis (Paddy) League is an ethnomusicologist, performer, and composer specializing in the music and oral poetry traditions of the Greek islands, Northeastern Brazil, the West of Ireland, and their respective diasporas. His dissertation research at Harvard University focuses on narratives of difference and displacement in the musical and material culture of the Boston-area Anatolian Greek diaspora. Paddy has published articles and reviews in the Journals of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and the Modern Greek Studies Association, as well as the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America. He has also contributed chapters on traditional Greek music to the edited collections The Ethnomusicologist's Cookbook, Volume II and the forthcoming Greek Music in America, and his translation of Greek folklorist Nikolaos Nitsos' Tales, Rituals, and Songs was recently published by Holy Cross Press. Paddy received the 2015 Victor Papacosma Graduate Student Essay Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association, as well as the James T. Koetting Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2014 and 2015. He is director of the Harvard Libraries Hidden Collections project “Sounds and Moving Images of Greek Shadow Theatre,” a research assistant in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, and a graduate student affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He actively performs, records, and teaches Greek, Brazilian, and Irish music on violin, various lutes, accordion, tsambouna (goatskin bagpipe), and percussion.
Abstract
Testimonials of the Greco-Turkish War: Pluralizing the Practice of Truth-Telling
The Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange (1919-1924) signaled the end of empire in the Aegean and the definitive apogee of the nation state. Over the next several decades, the consolidation of Greek and Turkish national narratives was assisted by, among other things, the rise of the testimonial, a new literary genre that offered readers the “first-hand accounts” of witnesses to the war and its aftermath. From the 1930s until the end of the Cold War, Greek and Turkish testimonials enjoyed a significant place within national literary canons on both sides of the Aegean.
Key to their generic power was the perceived authenticity of their narrative voice. In supposed opposition to the autobiographies of generals and statesmen, which were viewed as distanced and ideologically colored, the testimonial claimed to supply readers with a direct account of the war. Stripping itself of rhetorical embellishment, the testimonial used its bare and unrefined style to reproduce something close to the oral, with its immediate (which is to say, unmediated) truth-telling. It became, as one critic remarked, “a valuable document for the world to learn what happened in Anatolia ... The truth emerges from facts, not from rhetorical flairs.” Nonetheless, alongside the immediacy of its witnessing voice, the testimonial was simultaneously celebrated, again and again, for the authorial artistry that had shaped and embedded that voice within a literary narrative. Celebrated for both its unrefined, folk-like speech and its careful craft, the genre seemed founded on a tension that, although unacknowledged, worked latently throughout the text.
At the heart of this tension lay the testimonial’s narrative “I.” Who was hiding behind this subject position? Both the paratextual materials of the testimonials themselves and the critical responses to the genre failed to answer the question with any real transparency. Rather, they replied with a rhetorical ploy: the “I” was both singular and multitudinous, for in avoiding the elevated and isolated position of bourgeois autobiography, the testimonial gave voice to the collective experience of the nation. As a result of such rhetoric, the Greek and Turkish testimonial was quickly converted into a kind of national monument. And in its capacity as monument, it was set in stone, petrified and eternalized.
I revisit this assessment, using the methodological tools of Book History to recover a different kind of textual voice, grounded in neither the singular author or witness nor the anonymous multitude but in a network of textual agents. With my detailed textual histories and close readings of two key testimonials (those of Stratis Doukas and Halide Edib), I examine the multiple hands involved in the production and reproduction of these texts: witnesses, interviewers, authors, editors, translators and transcribers (each of whom assumed the guise of writer at one or several stages of production). I argue that we must view the testimonial text not as a calcified “work” but rather as an ongoing, socialized process, articulated over the course of several, multimedial layers and editions.
Bio
Will Stroebel is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Michigan. Before his doctorate studies he obtained a dual BA in classical languages and English literature from Grinnell College and an MA in comparative literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His dissertation examines the consolidation of modern textual authority and authorship as national institutions in Greece and Turkey, roughly from the dissolution of the Ottoman regime in 1923 to the end of the 60s. Tracing the "social life of texts" as manufactured objects, built and rebuilt by many hands, he foregrounds the complexities and contingencies of the author-centric system, shedding light on the multiple actors and institutions constructing it over a period of several decades.
Last updated 4/8/16