Graph(t)ing the Visual: Modern Greek Studies in the Diaspora

The modern world’s social changes engendered by the new power shifts and the exponential growth of mass communications media have not only posed fundamental questions regarding the viability of existing political alliances but have also brought about a crisis of confidence within the academy. This crisis is manifested in the shifts and turns that have been taking place within and across disciplines—from the questioning of the Eurocentric paradigm, to the constructedness of discourses and bodies, to a general skepticism about the university’s viability as a distinct social entity.

“Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering.”

—Pierre Bourdieu (1993:215)

“What we see, and the manner in which we come to see it, is not simply part of a natural ability. It is rather intimately linked with the ways that our society has, over time, arranged its forms of knowledge, its strategies of power and its systems of desire.”

—Chris Jenks (1995)

In the process, most academics in the humanities and social sciences have developed an increasing awareness of the arbitrariness and limitation of their disciplinary practices and have been scrambling to adapt to the challenges posed by postcolonial, feminist, and cultural studies discourses. Modern Greek studies is not alone in finding itself challenged by a declining interest in the field, in its case “most keenly noticeable in literature” according to the organizers of the conference on “Whither the Neohellenic?”—an occasion to explore this decline and rethink the future of Modern Greek in the academy.

I have been interested in matters neohellenic for a long time as someone on the periphery. Although aware that I cannot speak authoritatively while occupying this marginal position, I nevertheless wish to address the subject of the “visual” ¹ in the Modern Greek field. ² In view of the absence of archives, referees, and rights of passage in relation to visual studies, ³ this effort—as its title implies—is a “graft” meant to add something new and different.

Eight years ago, writing about the twentieth anniversary of the Modern Greek Studies Association of America, Vassilis Lambropoulos (1989:1) described a small academic group that had “rapidly evolved into a national scholarly organization of international prestige, with its own forums, activities, publications, independence and authority.” What a difference a handful of years makes! Despite its spectacular growth and authority, now the neohellenic appears to have lost its rudder. “The decline, at least in prestige and cultural capital, is not just Greek but Western. As Jusdanis says in his introduction to the papers from “Whither the Neohellenic?” (1997), “While translations of East European, third world, postcolonial, and, in general, non-Western authors receive wide attention and critical acclaim, the works of Greek postmodern novelists, poets, women writers, or memoirists remain virtually unknown abroad.” It is the literature of the former Eastern bloc and the third world that gets translated, reviewed, celebrated, and read. Yes, it is true that the decline is felt mostly within literary circles. But is this only because of the fickle and at heart Orientalist temperament of the mainstream academy, or is it to a large extent because of the more mundane but equally relevant institutional realities of the Modern Greek studies field and its coming of age during the height of the “linguistic turn”? The academy, preoccupied with issues of language and politics, was then temperamentally ready for the arriving neohellenists. The time was perfect. But neither time nor interpretative schemata stand still.

During the last ten or fifteen years, another “turn” has taken place, giving way to the field of visuality and spectorship—what W. J. T. Mitchell (1995) has called the “pictorial turn.” ⁴ Why Modern Greek studies did not (could not?) take this new turn can best be answered by those within who possess the power to influence institutional agendas; yet, as someone from the outside looking in, I can offer some plausible explanations. Modern Greek studies became established at a time when the prominent metaphor in the humanities was the textual and literary, but also at a time when language was important—indeed central—in the diaspora...