Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film and Popular Culture ed. by Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan (review)

This noteworthy edited book is a kaleidoscope of contributions by scholars, fiction writers, and film directors. The papers were originally presented in the summer of 2016 at the University of Copenhagen’s international workshop, “Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989.” Divided into two parts, the volume revisits and reframes modern Greek history through literature, film, theater, and popular culture in order to reflect on present day Greece. The thought-provoking content and the timing of the book’s release are significant: readers are presented with a multilayered exploration of the relation between culture and history, past and present, just ahead of the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence and not long after the financial crisis of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015. Since the volume’s release, the notion of crisis has continued to reverberate and to express different kinds of challenges on the regional and global levels: these include populism, the pandemic, and rising intrastate and interstate tensions in the eastern Mediterranean. In the midst of this turbulent period, the book invites readers to explore contemporary Greek cultural production and its observant critique of the modern Greek experience. The contributors consider dis/continuities, omissions, silences, unearthed memories, legacies, and the marginalized, as well as old and new identities emerging from a nation that frames its modern existence and sense of belonging in multiple ways, resulting in hybrid characteristics. This project can be situated alongside recent publications that focus on different aspects of Greek history and culture—for example, the collections edited by Dimitris Tziovas (2017), by Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis (2004), and by Keith Brown and Yannis Hamilakis (2003).

Part 1 of this collection is organized under four themes: “Popularizing Neglected Pasts,” “Constructing Past, Present, and Future in Migrant Fiction,” “Trauma, Sentimentality, and Crisis in Literature,” and “Satire and Nostalgia in Popular Culture.” Important references are made to public history—defined as “the process in which historical knowledge is constructed (or challenged) through objects, artifacts, and memorials, but also through works of art, including fiction” (87)—as well as to cultural intimacy, described as the “kind of intimacy or familiarity that can be cultivated when approaching what is considered to be the suppressed ‘other’ through literature”; this kind of cultural intimacy, we are told, “is different from the similarly termed anthropological concept, because of its potential in healing collective traumas and subverting hegemonic narratives” (16).

Trine Stauning Willert reflects on contemporary fiction with references to the Ottoman empire, noting that by “creating intimacy and empathy with characters that are thought to be foreign by origin, religion, or name,” such fiction allows them to become “normalized, less foreign, or even part of the self” (17–18). Kostis Kornetis skillfully highlights recent references to Thessaloniki’s past and its Sephardic Jewish community in films, documentaries, graphic journalism, and novels, and he calls attention to how “public history forms an unofficial corpus that not only informs, but also alters the way in which we tend to look at the history of Thessaloniki” (41). Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the legacy of Louis Tikas, a twentieth-century Greek immigrant and labor leader in the United States. Concentrating on American poet David Mason’s verse novel Ludlow (named after the place where Tikas and other miners were killed while on strike in 1914), Anagnostou notes the “ethical and political responsibilities of recovering [. . .] identities” and “the ethical and political responsibility for bringing the nuances of the past into representation in the present” (61). Karen Emmerich examines the novels of Gazmend Kapllani, Greece’s first Albanian immigrant author, with reflections on the notion of time, Greek citizenship, and the children of immigrants in Greece and their struggles. As Emmerich points out, “Kapllani challenges conventional understandings of national belonging and promotes new modalities...