Mediterranean Topographies before Balkanization: On Greek Diaspora, Emporion, and Revolution

Diaspora 6:2 1997 Mediterranean Topographies before Balkanization: On Greek Diaspora, Emporion, and Revolution Artemis Leontis1 The Ohio State University Introduction I place my work under the rubric of spatial studies: an investigation of how people inhabit their world. The corner of the world I examine is the northeastern Mediterranean, a highly contested region that has brought into contact numerous peoples: Greek, Persian, and Roman in ancient times; Byzantine, Slavic, Arabic, Venetian, Frankish, Jewish, Armenian, and Ottoman in the late ancient to early modern period; and Greek, Turkish, Slavic, and Albanian in our own times. Literature is my point of entry into that world. Though it is unusual in spatial studies, an area of inquiry dominated by geography, architecture, environmental psychology, political theory, and anthropology, I find the literary approach quite useful. For literature has always occupied itself with topographia or topothesia, the “description” or “situation of place” (Curtius 200). Literature relies on historical and geographical spatiality to orient its readers and send them on its imaginative journey. To map its world, literature builds on topoi, sites of learning where the past makes its presence felt. While rhetorical theory defines topoi as well-tested themes for the composition of a logos, a discourse, we should not forget the word’s primary meaning.2 In Greek, topos refers to a physical place: not just a passage in a text, but any territory, position, or situation that resonates with meaning because it is a familiar site (Leontis, Topographies 18–19). Literature brings topoi into the written word, where their significance becomes more and more layered. Greek literature is especially rich in its layering of topoi, as it tends to keep returning to elements that constitute its paideia, its inheritance of learning. At the same time, Greek literature of the past two centuries has been inclined to relate literary to physical topoi. Having embraced all that expresses the sense of being entopios, “at home in one’s native topos”—the vernacular language, narrow geography, and particular past that are the foundations of the modern nation (Leontis, “Beyond Hellenicity” 218)—it brings into focus the reciprocal interdependence of topoi in its world: the xxxxxxxxxxxx 179 Diaspora 6:2 1997 rhetorical habits it has inherited and the sites its people inhabit. The Mediterranean is the larger world that ultimately concerns me here. But there is much that stands in the way of my reflecting directly on that world. With the demise of area studies, the proliferation of critiques of the nation, and the loss of faith in grand narratives, it has become difficult to ponder what connects people across broad stretches. We are loath to attach special qualities to regions, whether the Mediterranean or the classical world, Africa or Islam, Europe or Asia. Instead we focus—often through the translucent screen of memory—on the marginal case, the third world obscured by the glare of hegemony. Intellectual paths cross briefly where we find the ideological topoi of the day: minority, hybridity, exile, travel, the postcolonial, the nomad, and the overarching vault of memory, all of which assume a cautiously selfcircumscribed or carelessly indefinite territoriality. Here we enter into the most tentative of dialogues about our differences. Here we share our humble stories of migration and marginalization. In the clearing made by recent critiques of the nation-state, and simultaneously filled with celebrations of diversity and diffusion, words of perpetual motion, crossings, and mixing draw our attention . These offer passage to larger discussions. “Diaspora,” for example, permeates a variety of fields,3 from refugee to immigration studies, which, having converged on diaspora, seem to have lost their own separate way. While scholars have noted the excessive, imprecise use of diaspora in academic as well as popular writing, the usage of the word continues to spread—whether because its long literary history, suggestive etymology, or useful ambiguity give it a special resonance, it is hard to say.4 A term popularized recently in English but long in use to describe the scattering of human populations, diaspora refers to a wide range of human migrations under its large etymological umbrella of scattered seeds (from the Greek dia, “throughout,” and speiro, “to sow”). Greek authors first used it metaphorically...