Beyond "Home Identity"?: Immigrant Voices in Contemporary Greek Fiction

The unprecedented influx of immigrants in Greece in the last decades has led to a proliferation of fictions of migration. The emerging stories of migrants, refugees, and repatriates constitute a privileged field for the expression and reconfiguration of the problems created by the explosive presence of cultural difference within the nation's supposedly homogeneous society. Recent texts by Boulotis, Faïs, Firtinidou, and Hatzimoisiadis pose questions of identity, belonging, and democracy from the perspective of migrant characters, who articulate in their first-person narratives the experience of discrimination and victimization suffered in the host society. Reading these texts presents perplexing issues: does first-person or monologic narration intended to portray reality authentically, to criticize oppressive practices, and to generate empathy for the suffering immigrant contribute to the vision of a constructive intercultural existence? Do such invented self-accounts of experience suggest a conceptualization of immigrant characters as empowered subjects? Do they allow for conceptions of identity as multiple and provisional or do they reproduce essentialist notions rooted in the national culture?