Historical Memory in Greece, 1821–1930


Book Description

This book presents a social and cultural history of collective memory in modern Greece during the first century of state independence, contributing to the debate over the relationship between memory and identity. It discusses how modern Greek society commemorated its distant and recent pasts, both real and imagined, namely antiquity, Byzantium, the Greek Revolution and the Asia Minor Catastrophe; how cultural memory was shaped by the various war experiences (victory, defeat, mass death and mourning, refugeedom); and how memory politics became arenas of social and political strife. Historical painting, monuments, historical pageantry, tableaux vivants, national anniversaries, performances of ancient drama and revivals of ancient games are analyzed as instances where the past was visualized, represented, performed and "consumed". An explosion in public history has taken place over the last decades around the world, with a veritable flood of commemorations, anniversaries and "memory wars". As more and more social groups claim the "right to remember", public discourse and polemics have arisen at the same time that traumatic memory has become a field of international academic research. In the arena of public history, historical memory is being constructed through the sentimental, irrational reception of mythological narratives told through images.




The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States


Book Description

This book examines the question of historical awareness within the Greek communities in the diaspora, adding a new perspective on the discussion about the Greek Revolution of 1821 by including the forgotten Greeks in the United States and Canada. The purpose of this volume is to discuss the impact of the Greek Revolution as manifested in various discourses. It is celebrated by the Greek communities, taught in Greek schools, covered in the local newspapers. It is an inspiration for literary, artistic, and theatrical creations. The chapters reflect a broad range of disciplines (history, literature, art history, ethnology, and education), offering both historical and contemporary reflections. This volume produces new knowledge about the Greeks in the United States and Canada for the last 100 years. The Greek Revolution and the Greek Diaspora in the United States will attract scholars, students, and public readers of Modern Greek Studies and Greek American Studies, as well as those interested in comparative history, diaspora and ethnic studies, memory studies, and cultural studies.




Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture


Book Description

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.




Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment


Book Description

This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.




Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution


Book Description

Using a variety of methodologies from multi-disciplinary backgrounds, this volume is the first to present an in-depth analysis of the life and times of Laskarina Bouboulina, the legendary heroine of the Greek Revolution and one of the most important figures in modern Greek history, the Mediterranean, and indeed, the world. At the age of fifty and mother to ten children, Bouboulina commanded a fleet of ships from the island of Spetses and became the first female admiral in world naval history. But her success on the battlefield is only part of the story – by considering her three-century impact on feminism, cultural production, and as a touchstone of diasporic Greek identity, the contributors to this volume also expand our understanding of her far-reaching and under-recognized contributions.




The History of Experience


Book Description

In a wide arc from the Paleolithic to the present day, this book explores the changing structure of human experience and its impact on the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, and political ideas. The main thesis is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant but changes over time. Looking at the entire range of human history, there are a total of nine transformations, beginning with conscious perception and imagination in the Paleolithic and ending, for the time being, in modern times with the discovery of the unconscious. In between, this book explores six more transformations that took place in different regions and at different times, which include a sense of order, self-reflection, the eye of reason, spiritual experience, as well as the experience of creativity and of consciousness. As such, The History of Experience presents both a cross-cultural and comparative theory of experience and cultural dynamics, and an exploration of rich materials from East and West. This book is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the relationship between history, human experience, culture, and political order.




Research Handbook on Visual Politics


Book Description

The Research Handbook on Visual Politics focuses on key theories and methodologies for better understanding visual political communication. It also concentrates on the depictions of power within politics, taking a historical and longitudinal approach to the topic of placing visuals within a wider framework of political understanding.




Creating and Opposing Empire


Book Description

Focusing on the Portuguese Empire, this book examines colonial press issued in "metropolitan" spaces and in colonies, disclosing dissonant narratives and problematizations of colonial empires. Creating and Opposing Empire is a venture of the International Group for Studies of Colonial Periodical Press of the Portuguese Empire (IGSCP-PE), which also invests on comparative studies and conceptual discussions. This book analyses representations of Empire at colonial press published in "metropolitan" spaces and in colonies. By joining these spaces in the same analytic look, it explores different problematizations of colonial empires. The diversity of angles discloses why a decolonized, democratic, understanding of the world modulated by modern colonial empires needs to navigate the seas of dissonant narratives of community, nation, and empire. The book deals with the ideas that in their complexity and dynamism, until late in the twentieth century, were moulded in the game between the cultural context of representations and the universality of concepts. The studies range from approaches to International Exhibitions, Metropolitan Press, Colonial Models, Missionary Press, Literary Discourses, Colonial and Postcolonial Press, Constructing the "Others", Anticolonial Press, Democracy, Dictatorship, Censorship, Colonial Prison’s Press, among other themes. Its primordial focus on the Portuguese Empire, introduces perspectives rarely included in international discussions on colonial and imperial press histories. This book is essential for scholars and students in Media Studies, Modern History, Cultural, Literary Studies and Political Science.




The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age


Book Description

This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across centuries and disciplines. Bringing to the fore the subject that features as an aside in gift studies, it offers new insights into the ambivalent and troubled history of gift-giving. Dangerous, violent, and self-destructive gift-giving remains an alluring challenge for scholars almost a hundred years after Marcel Mauss’s landmark work on the gift. Globally, the notion of toxic and fateful gifts has haunted mythologies, folklores, and literatures for millennia. This book problematizes what stands behind the notion of the 'dangerous gift' and demonstrates how this operational term may help us to better understand the role and place of gift-giving from antiquity to the present through a series of case studies ranging from ancient Zoroastrianism to modern digital dating. The book develops a complex historical, cross-cultural, and multi-disciplinary approach to gift-giving that invites comparisons between various facets of this phenomenon through time and across societies. The book will interest a wide range of scholars working in anthropology, history, literary criticism, religious studies, and contemporary digital culture. It will primarily appeal to university educators and researchers of political culture, pre-modern religion, social relations, and the relationship between commerce and gifts.




Landscape and Identity in the Modern Basque Country, 1800 to 1936


Book Description

Landscape and Identity in the Modern Basque Country, 1800 to 1936 studies the relationship between landscape and modern identities in the Basque Country. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural history and geography, it analyses the process of historical construction of the Basque landscape, highlighting its multiple political, social and cultural meanings. The book is divided into two parts: the first examines the discourses, images and representations of the Basque landscape; the second examines landscape practices through tourism, hiking and mountaineering. Focusing on the Basque case but establishing numerous connections with comparable phenomena in Western Europe, the book demonstrates that the landscape became a structuring element insofar as it helped shape individual identities while participating in the creation of social links. This book examines the processes of identity construction "from below" by means of new interpretative tools, such as the experience of landscape. This work, originally published in French, brings to an English-speaking audience a crucial issue in the modern history of the Basque Country, namely the cultural construction of a collective identity within the framework of a nation-state, such as Spain, confronted with multiple territorial identities. Approaching this question from the perspective of landscape provides new keys to understanding the processes of nation-building that occurred in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.