Stranger in the City: Self and Urban Space in the Work of Nicolas Calas

Nicolas Calas’s represented the self in conjunction with his perception of two cities, Athens and New York. The perceptions of identity in the case of migrant intellectuals like Calas are largely determined by the real and imagined space of the cities where they lived and created and not the “imagined community” of the nation. For Calas, spatiality and temporality in these two cities reveal his evolving perceptions of his own identity. From a spatial conception of time and history that permits him to liberate the self from a nostalgic and entrapping Athens, Calas moves in New York towards an understanding of the urban space as a constantly changing spectacle, and of himself in this space as a perpetual stranger. The figures of strangers and the strange figures that he adopts as personae in his work dramatize his identity as a stranger and suggest that, perhaps, being a stranger is the paradigmatic condition of the migrant artist and intellectual in modernism.