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The Empire Awaits the Barbarians: A New Perspective
- Journal of Modern Greek Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 29, Number 2, October 2011
- pp. 171-190
- 10.1353/mgs.2011.0021
- Article
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When Nikos Kazantzakis traveled to Alexandria as a newspaper correspondent in 1927, a most interesting part of his travel was the visit he paid to C. P.Cavafy at his house. The encounter of the two major Greek writers was narrated by Kazantzakis in a travel article on Cavafy. This travel text interacts mainly with Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" and provides the space for a new approach to Cavafy's text. Introducing the themes of the nomad/barbarian and the empire, later found in the perspective of the theories of nomadology and glo calization, Kazantzakis's travelogue reterritorializes Cavafy's poetry and its scholarship, and provides a new space for the generic identities of texts.