Will Stroebel
All right, I am here to introduce this series and then I will pass the mic on to our moderator for the first webinar in this series. This is the webinar "Decolonizing Diaspora, Theorizing Global Greek Diasporas and Histories of Colonization." It has been co-sponsored and meticulously designed over the course of several months by a collaboration between the Modern Greek Studies Association's Transnational Studies committee and Decolonize Hellas, two fantastic groups of people that I'm really excited to bring together into a shared conversation today and is being hosted locally by the Modern Greek program at the University of Michigan. So without further ado, let me introduce to you the moderator for this webinar and she will then introduce our speakers. So our moderator today is Anastasia Christou. She is a professor of sociology and social justice at Middlesex University, London, UK. She is also a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an academic activist, trade unionist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist. She's an interdisciplinary critical scholar in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, with a strong emphasis on public-facing scholarship that is relevant and transformative to broad audiences. us to see it publishes and teaches on identity and intersectionality and migrant minority youth and aging groups across multi-sided and comparative projects in the US, the UK and Europe, and has recently begun new work in North Africa and West Asia. Her work has been published in Harvard University Press and Amsterdam University Press among other venues and she is editor in chief of the journals, "Jew Humanities" and the journal of Further and higher education. And those are just a brief sampling of many of her accolades. I don't want to run to overtime, but she has done a lot of work and we are very lucky to have her. So without further ado, let me pass the mic to Anastasia who will get us started.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you very much, Will and colleagues. I'm absolutely thrilled to be moderating this event with a host of amazing colleagues across time zones and geographies and contexts. This is a particularly poignant Black anniversary for Greece. On the 21st of April, in 1967, the military dictatorship curtailed freedom, democracy, and unveiled a seven-year dark period of oppression. I'm particularly excited that we can resist the darkness through liberatory and anti-oppressive decolonial conversations today, and I feel really humbled and really privileged to be in this company. I'm particularly grateful to the University of Michigan for hosting this webinar and Will for being beyond superhuman in putting together different time zones and colleagues and especially those colleagues who are either nearing or beyond midnight in their local time zones and are here to really share their amazing and fantastic work. So I could go on and on talking about them but I'm going to just give you their particular bios so you can have a flavor of the fantastic conversations and interventions that will follow. So I'm thrilled to introduce you to Dr. Adonis Pipero-Glu, who is the inaugural Hellenic senior lecturer in global diasporus at the University of Melbourne. Adonis is based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He is a cultural historian with a particular interest in mobilities and diasporizations across the settler colonial anglospheres. His historical research examines connections between settler colonialism, race and ethnicity, and diasporic flows between the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Adonis' work has been published in many forums, including the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Immigrant and Minorities, Ergon, Greek Diaspora Arts and Letters, and the Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek Studies, as well as the Cambridge History of Global migrations. With Zora Zimmage, he co-edited a special issue of Australian historical studies called Their Own Perception, Non-Anglom Migrants and Aboriginal Australia. More recently with Francesco Riccati, he co-edited the Open Access Volume, Researching Migration on Indigenous Lands, Reflections, Challenges, and Pathways, published by Springer. I'm also thrilled to introduce you to Dr. Efihia Milona, who is a Maria Skladaska Curie Onisilos co-fund postdoctoral researcher at the History and Archaeology and Social and Political Sciences departments at the University of Cyprus. Efthi here received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, the Institute of Area Studies at Leiden University, and she has taught from 2014 to 2024 at the International Studies Program at the same university. Her research and teaching interests include the contemporary history of Egypt and Greece, the political economy of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and Middle East diasporas. Eftihir is the principal investigator of the research project Life Around the Courts, legal practices of ethnic and religious pluralism in Egypt from the 1910s to the 1950s funded by the British Library's Endangered Archives program together with Dr. Mina Ibrahim and Ms. Yasmin Tarek from Shubra's Archives as co-applicants. And last but not least, Pinalobi Babaylias is Associate Professor of Social anthropology at the University of Thessaly where she directs the master's program in mobility studies. She's a fellow New Yorker, grew up in New York City, and is a good diasporic Greek child, studies English literature at Harvard and cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan before return in inverted commas migrating to her father's homeland. And indeed, I happened to first meet her at that time and interview her about her experiences. Her research centers on historical culture and the politics of memory, mediated witnessing and migrant death, colonial genealogies and decoloniality, and most recently black geographies and decolonial ecologies in the Greek context. She's committed to developing experimental pedagogies, multimodal ethnographies, and public anthropology via various collaborative community-centered initiatives, and has co-founded the Decolonize at LAS, the Pelian Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, and most recently the Diachronic and Empirical Landscape Observatory at the University of Thessaly. Some of Penelope's publications include genres of recollection, archival poetics and modern Greece, digital ethnography, a call to rasmblage, black feminist futures and ethnographic aesthetics, and Greek colonialities. It is an absolute privilege and pleasure to warmly welcome all speakers. Now, in terms of our sequence for this afternoon or morning or evening in your part of the world, we will start with Eftihiya. And Eftihiya, I welcome you, the floor is all yours. Please go ahead. Following that, Adonis, and then Penelope with her intervention. And we will reach a stage where we will have an open floor for questions and then responses from our two speakers, as well as our discussant, and then more questions and answers. And hopefully, I won't monopolize the floor by asking my endless questions, quenching my thirst for more and more. So I will now get into a mode of silence. Efthihia, welcome.
Eftychia Mylona
Thank you so much, Anastasia. Thank you, Will, for bringing us all together. And of course, Pinelope and Tandonis for joining me in this discussion. Good afternoon, good morning to some of us. And so today my paper will examine the Dodecanese diaspora in Egypt as a subaltern formation emerging at the intersection of colonialism, nationalism and transnational mobility in the early 20th century. It argues that the Dodecanese migrants in Egypt developed a distinct diasporic consciousness shaped not only by Italian colonial rule in the archipelago, but also by their positioning within the political and social landscapes of Indirgor and Wartal in Egypt. The analysis brings into dialogue postcolonial theory, particularly the concept of subalternatives, the Greek diaspora studies, which have traditionally emphasized merchant networks, cosmopolitanism and successful integration, and in contrast this paper foregrounds marginality, legal, precaried and political contestation as constitutive elements of the esporic life. Drawing on oral histories and Dodecanese-Egyptian newspapers, such as Ido de Canisos and Fonetis Casu, Iacouto de Dodecanese in Egypt articulated the form of the diasporic subalternity that diverged significantly from experiences in the archipelago. Specifically, their position was shaped by three interrelated dynamics-- their ambiguous legal status under the Italian regime, their alignment with Egyptian anti-colonial nationalism, and their active resistance to Italian imperial and cultural influence. This paper adopts a post-colonial understanding of subalternity not simply as economic marginalization, but as a condition produced through exclusion from hegemonic structures of power, representation, and citizenship. Following this perspective, subalternity is not a fixed identity, but a relational position shaped by shifting imperial and national regimes. Building on this insight, I approach the Dudekanis diaspora not merely as economically or politically marginal, but as positioned within overlapping structures that limit their capacity to be recognized as legitimate political subjects. Moreover, drawing on Endor Said's notion of Orientalism, particularly his emphasis on how imperial power produced knowledge and cultural hierarchies, Italian colonial discourse in the Dudekanis framed through Mediterraneanism can be understood as part of this broader epistemic project, a way of incorporating certain populations into Europe while excluding others as Oriental. At the same time, the paper engages Greek diaspora studies, which have often privileged narratives of prosperity and mobility, particularly in the context of Greek communities in Egypt. While this scholarship has highlighted cosmopolitanism and integration, it has paid less attention to internal hierarchies and uneven experiences within the diaspora itself. To theorize diaspora engage after brass concept of diaspora space, which emphasizes the entanglement of multiple subject positions, migrant, native, colonized, and colonized within a shared social field. The Dodecanese in Egypt inhabited precisely such a space where Greek, Italian, Egyptian, and British imperial formation intersected. By focusing on the Dodecanese case, this paper complicates such narratives. It suggests that diaspora should not be understood solely as a space of opportunity, but also as a side where colonial difference is reproduced and renegotiated. In this sense, the de Canis diaspora constitutes what may be termed a subaltern diaspora, a community whose members are simultaneously embedded in diasporic networks and subjected to forms political, legal, and symbolic marginalization. I'll give first a brief historical background and then I'll go into my analysis. The Dutta Canis Islands came under Italian control following the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, 1912, with the exception of Castellore's of which passed into Italo 1921 and were formally annexed in 1923 under the Treaty of Luzhan. Italian colonial governors, particularly under fascism, so to incorporate the islands into a broader imperial vision grounded in Mediterraneanism. When the Italians left, the Duttecanis fell under the German and British occupation until they became part of the Greek nation state 1947. Italy's assimilation projects on the Duttecanis Archipelago under the administration of Cesare Maria de Vecchi, demarcated ideas about the Italian adoption of Mediterraneanism in Beijing. As Valeriy Macuire underscores, those ideas expanded the notions of nation-state, but also set symbolic borders as to who could belong to that nation, excluding for example the Oriental Jews. As part of this attempt, its attempts to restore its past glory as a Mediterranean empire and show that the island's inhabitants were not under colonial rule, Italy's fastest regime created the Italian Aegean citizenship for those of the Décanese highlanders who resided in the archipelago at the time of its official annexation in 1923. In practice, the cedatina G. Italiana was far from being an actual citizenship. Décanese persons did not have the right to vote and were not considered legally Italian Yet, they could not claim Greek nationality either, as the fastest regime prevented them from doing so. Moreover, the archipelago's residents were also subject to the Italian fastest discourse. Indeed, if they collaborated with the fastest regime by expressing loyalty and serving in its military army, they could become full Italian citizens. This legal category exemplifies what postcolonial scholars have identified as the "abivalence of colonial inclusion. While it nominally extended citizenship to the Elantirs, it denied them full political rights and prevented them from claiming Greek nationality. Thus, the Gany subjects occupied a liminal position, neither full Italian nor legally Greek. This condition of juridical in-betweenness became particularly significant diaspora, where legal status shaped access to rights, mobility, and protection. The Dudekanis diaspor in Egypt emerged as a critical site for the articulation of anti-colonial discourse. The Greek-Egyptian newspaper, "Rido the Kani Source," first published in Alexandria in 1925, provides a key entry point into this political imaginary. From its inaugural issue, the newspaper framed the Italian rule as a form of moral and legal injustice, emphasizing forced assimilation, educational propaganda, and economic marginalization. It positioned itself as a transnational platform aimed at mobilizing the De Canis communities across the globe in support of self-determination and union with Greece. Importantly, the newspaper also articulated a diasporic political subjectivity. It did not merely report on events in the archipelago, but actively sought to shape the consciousness of its feeders in Egypt. Its critique of Italian citizenship encapsulated in the warning, quote, "Be aware of Italians even when bearing gifts," end of quote, illustrates how colonial policies were interpreted through the lens of diasporic experience. Moreover, the newspaper functioned as a medium through which the subaltern could speak, albeit with constraints. While Spiva cautions against romanticizing such moments, the diasporic press nonetheless provided a platform for articulating political demands and fostering collective consciousness across dispersed communities. Here, postcolonial theory helps illuminate the gap between imperial discourse and subaltern reception. While Italian authorities presented citizenship as a benevolent gesture, diasporic actors understood it as a mechanism of control, tied to militarization and imperial expansion. The Second World War marked a critical moment in the reconfiguration of legal and political identities. Italian-Egyptian subjects in Egypt became entangled in broader imperial conflicts, particularly following Italy's entry into the war. British authorities in Egypt interned thousands of individuals holding Italian papers, revealing how quickly legal categorizations could become instruments of exclusion. Oral histories demonstrate the uneven impact of these measures. Some avoided interment through the intervention of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, while others experienced detention and displacement. A number of minor locutors who migrated to Egypt during the period of Italian occupation were designated as Italian Aegean subjects. "Not that it is a result of having actively applied for them," said the Dinagia In order to mitigate potential risks, including the possibility of internment, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate facilitated the issuance of Egyptian documentation for the entire family following her birth. Subsequently, with the incorporation of the de-decanese into the Greek state in 1947, Jorwos' family, like many others originating from the archipelago, became eligible for and acquired Greek citizenship. the prohibition of dual nationality at that time, Jorwoson Polikseni opted to claim Greek rather than Egyptian citizenship. Elvira, the daughter of Jorwoson Polikseni, remained unaware of her initial legal status and of the documentation issued to her in infancy. As a result, she did not know that she may have been eligible to claim Egyptian citizenship which would have afforded her understated access to the Egyptian labor market and other state resources in later life. Instead, she consistently understood herself to have been an exclusive lateric citizen. This assumption was only brought in question through the experience of her husband, Costas, a first-generation Egyptian Greek born in Alexandria in 1943. Following his acquisition of Egyptian citizenship in 1988, Costas sought to extend the status to his wife, at which point Elvira's prior eligibility, previously unknown to her, was revealed. Elvira was still an Egyptian citizen for the Egyptian authorities. Clearly, her and the family's changed status had come unnoticed all those years by the Egyptian state. This experience has highlighted the multiplicity of documentary regimes through which diasporic subjects navigated belonging. Italian, Greek and Egyptian forms of identification overlapped and conflicted, producing a fluid and often precarious legal landscape. The experience of the Dudekanis cannot be understood in isolation, but must be situated within a broader field of intersecting power relations involving British colonial rule, Egyptian nationalism and Italian imperialism. In addition, the role of the Greek Orthodox Plater arcade is particularly significant in this context. Acting as an intermediary authority, it facilitated access to alternative forms of documentation, effectively reshaping individuals' legal status. This underscores the persistence of non-state actors in structuring belonging even in the context of modern nation States. A key distinction between the de de Canis and the archipelago in Dose in Diaspora lies in the absence of colonial nostalgia. In the islands, some segments of the population retrospectively associated Italian rule with modernization, citing infrastructure projects and economic development, as Nicolas Dumanes has shown in his work. For the archipelago de de Canis who received the colonial development, Italians represented progress and modernity, Italianita represented Europe opposite to the backward Ottoman past. Even though all those development projects were never meant for the benefit of the colonized, the locals could still appropriate them as their symbolic capital. Colonial nostalgia acted as a social practice that mobilized viral signs of the past in the archipelagos' contemporarily struggles. In contrast, such narratives are largely absent among the diaspora in Greece, in Egypt. This divergence can be understood through the lens of colonial difference. While certain island communities experience selective investment, diaspora populations encounter Italian rule primarily through legal exclusion, propaganda, and wartime repression. As a result, the diaspora developed a more consistently critical stance talk or sit down in colonialism. Their separate and consciousness was not shaped by a bevel and so recommendation, but by resistance and political mobilization. The formation of the Deucanese Youth Association in Alexandria in 1928 illustrates how the support of alternate to generate forms of collective agency. The Association also open branches in Nairn, Port Said, in Cairo, in other places in Egypt. It sought to counter Italian influence by providing welfare services, promoting Greek cultural identity, and disseminating anti-fascist discourse. Italian authorities had attempted to cultivate loyalty among the diaspora through what may be described as colonial proselytism, offering employment assistance, medical care, and educational opportunities. These initiatives blurred the boundaries between welfare and political control. In response, the Youth Association developed parallel structures of support. Philanthropy thus became a site of political contestation, through which competing visions of belonging were articulated. By reducing dependence on Italian institutions, The association strengthened communal autonomy and reinforced alignment with Greek and Egyptian nationalist currents. At the same time, these processes involved the active policing of internal boundaries. Pro-Italian voices within the community were marginalized and incidents of disruption and protest revealed the extent of which the Asper cohesion was actively produced rather than given. To conclude, the De Canis diaspora in Egypt offers, I think, a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between diaspora, colonialism, and subalternity. Rather than a space of unambiguous opportunity or cosmopolitan integration, diaspora emerges here as a terrain marked by legal ambiguity, political struggle, and uneven foul relations. By situating this case within post-colonial theory in Greek diaspora studies, The paper has argued for the concept of a sabbalton diaspora, a formation shaped by exclusion from dominant structures of citizenship and representation, yet capable of generating its own forms of agency and resistance. Ultimately, these experiences of the Dutekanese in Egypt demonstrate how the historic communities can both reproduce and contest colonial hierarchies. Their navigation of multiple regimes of belonging, Italian, Greek, Egyptian, reveals the fluid and contested nature of identity in the contemporary Eastern Mediterranean. There's alternatives not only produced through colonial domination, but also reconfigured in diaspora, where new forms of agency, resistance, and identification emerge. Thank you very much.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you very much, Efihia. Adonis, the floor is yours.
Andonis Piperoglou
- Thank you. Bear with me folks as I set up my Zoom. There with my PowerPoint. Hello, good to see everyone. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you today from Wurundjeri country here in Melbourne. although it's a dark past midnight evening, the suns are bright, there are no clouds over us at the moment, which is a rare thing in this city. And I'd like to acknowledge this country. My mother was born in British Cyprus. My grandfather was also born on the Daudakinese when it was an Italian colonial space. So in a sense, I've inherited a healthy distrust of colonial regimes in this settler colony that I live on, which still holds a British flag on it as one of its national symbols. And I just also wanna just take a quick note to acknowledge my fellow speakers, my collaborators here, my interlockers. I think we've been talking about these themes for some time in different settings and across different spaces, but I think it's an important conversation and I hope the generative discussion that we'll hear from in a sec from Penelope will reveal that to you all. So my paper today is touching on our theme decolonizing diasporas. And I'm speaking to you today, as is after here, as a trained historian, through the examination of what I'm increasingly thinking of as Australia's many Greek diasporas. And it posits that a range of distinct Greek diasporic historical consciousnesses have been shaped in tandem with intersecting histories of colonialism, settler colonial Anglo culture, and associated trends in kind of what we could think of as multicultural expressivity. Such shaping also operates in symphony with the lived generational experiences of racialization, ethnosization and diasporization. My focus on the histories of colonialism and diaspora brings into dialogue conceptual interventions in diasporas studies, interventions that have have generatively grappled with, I think, the here and there, the then and now within global histories of colonization, particularly the dynamics of mobility and migration within new imperial history. And also in my immigration and ethnic histories in English-speaking settler colonial polities, like Australia, Canada, and the US. And as has been well-documented and critiqued historical inquiry into immigration and ethnicity has typically been beholden to neat contributors and celebratory national narratives that render Greek migrants as model migrants who become good Australians, Canadians and Megaricans, maybe Argentinians too. So as models of upward social mobility, successful integration and value contributors to illiberal multiculturalism. And so by foregrounding histories of racialization alongside contemporary and historically grounded street art, street murals in Melbourne and Sydney, today I'm interested in showcasing how critical inquiry into diasporic cultural life can be, perhaps be generatively re-examined, reimagined by the colonial ends that is attentive to indigenous low knowledges and standpoints that call for historical redress and repair the world over. So riding on my historical grounding, if you will, in what we could think of as historical whiteness studies and its intersection with Greek migration history, today I wanna touch on a range of images that illuminate the shifting contours of diasporization in Sydney and Melbourne. By an examination of a diasporic visual culture, I hope to demonstrate the ways that intergenerational diasporic culture chooses to use the past and by extension pay particular homage to Pacific aspects of their past while inadvertently promoting singular framings of ethnic heritage. So with this said, I'd also so like to emphasize that the making of distinctively Greek Australian Greek diasporas, and I place emphasis on the plural here, trans-historically shifts across space and time and is often influenced by regionally Pacific Greek settler identities, Pontus, Asia Minor, Cyprus, or as we well know, historically Greek-speaking regions that are of course outside the territory of the nation state and how they, I guess, produce from a range of Australian local contexts. The visual archive that I draw upon encompasses histories of what Ayoana Lalioto describes in Transatlantic Subjects as the exhibition of migrant subjectivity. Some of these visual cultures, particularly this immigration guide, the first Greek book published in Australia in 1916, have circulated via online community sharing platforms and publications and reprinted by ethnic community organizations, in this case, the Kithran Association of Australia. Motivating my approach to interpreting this visual and often interactive archive is the idea that such visual culture decimated from studios and albums and from archival collections and museum displays. And they offer a highly circumscribed view of the role that photography plays with "migrancy and processes of diasporization. "The visual medium of the photograph, in other words, "plays a pivotal role in enhancing our understandings "of the movement of people within and across borders. "Cameras, after all, documented, enabled, "or controlled human movement across geographical, "cultural, and political divides. "Their operators literary captured movements in time in which the dynamics of migrant C be a voluntary or forced can be preserved visually. In doing so, they helped make observable the motivations for and effects of mobile actors, ranging from hardship and suffering to opportunity and optimism. Indeed, photo showcase a tendency to manifest, publicize, exhibit, and perform an individual on communities loyalty to their adopted homeland. And so by 1916, photography became a source of fascination and public spheres of an emergent Greek diaspora in Australia, as newspapers, magazines, books and immigration guides have been publishing pictures of respectable Greek settlers that represented new forms of subjectivity. Just take a photo here of the statue of Captain Cook in this immigration guide. Photography attracted the migrants' imagination and fantasies since often combined specularizing of public life and national sentiment. Pictures, in other words, could convey a twofold message. First, Greek migrants' loyalty to Australia and the British Empire, and second, the cultural capital that Britness embodied to the exclusion exclusivist and evolving settler colonial culture. Contemporary diasporic cultures in Australia place significant value in history making and historical murals as a popular and hit form of territorial performativity have become a means to archive, document, celebrate, debate, reconsider, and process Greek past across suburbs, popular tourist sites, and global diasporic medias. So underlying my approach to this visual archive is a broader conceptual concern to better historicize trans cultural settler colonial encounters by giving attention to the plurality of Greek Australian placemaking processes and identifications. Further through our reading of decolonizing approaches to historical inquiry and indigenous knowledges, many of my fellow collaborators here in Australia increasingly working within a kind of, you know, evolving field of migration studies or interested, I guess, in moving discussion of phenomenon, ignoring how other cultural groups like people from the Mediterranean region who held, as we just heard from FD here, you know, differing and overlapping colonial relations. But they also held precarious status within the dominant white racial fantasies. And they uniquely therefore formed their own disavowal of indigenous sovereignty and then speededly learned to rework their own culture across deeply storied landscapes that were impacted by the invasiveness of settler colonial intrusion. Be it through architectural design, just think about the many neoclassical buildings dotted across English speaking worlds, place naming like Little Greece in Sydney or North America's many Greek towns, or the many lemon trees that shade the backyards of many Australian suburban homes. I think it's now possible due to the new imperial turn in historical inquiry, as well as more advanced studies in diasporic life to re-examine the roots, R-O-U-T-E, yes, the migrants used to come here in the senses of rootedness, R-O-O-T, that many of those diasporic cultures fostered and continue to foster. such a re-examination of how non-englo migrants, in this case Greeks, begin to feel a sense of belonging by literally marking or perhaps painting, as you'll see is more apt for today, are on the country that they moved to, toiled over, built their homes on and nurtured their families in, has the potential to enhance a wider public debates and vernaculars, and how to articulate the pluralisms of our past and transcultural realities in diasporic life, the many diasporic lives, if you will. In recognizing colonialist modes of power and the importance of anti-colonial struggles over land, while also positing the existence of other spheres of experiential life and belonging, where one can be removed from relations of power, I guess I'm interested in alternative forms of rootedness to recognize the transcultural dynamics of settler colonial culture. And so here I'm channeling Lebanese Australian anthropologist Dassan Hajj and his powerful essay, "The Fig, The Pomegranate and the Olive Tree" or the pomegranate tree, so I got the trees mixed up there, thoughts on another Australian belonging. To embrace fears of cultural interaction in Australia, I wish to emphasize how historicizing open and sometimes non-exclusivist forms of rootedness to country, capital C, drawing on indigenous framing of country that is deeply spiritual, a living entity, encompassing land and waterways and seas and skies, representing a profound sense of belonging, identity and kinship to place, can allow for recognition of a superimposed multiplicity of roots that is not necessarily grounded in stasis and a possessive type of rooting that claims outright monopoly over the place of its emergence. The power of alternative roots, according to Hodge, is that such roots are not fixed or grounded, but instead they are roots that stay with their mobile subjects as they move. They are forms of rootedness that can be seen as a mode of belonging that can stand in opposition or perhaps shadow the narrow territorial ways that being rooted has often been understood in this country. So I think this point is well made when I turn to these two visual images, one of which has been the sort of shared on our tile in recent wins. One's a photograph of the Carus Oyster Cafe and the others a racist anti-Greek cartoon from the smooth weekly and Australian tabloid that spawns what was the proclivity of Greeks rather to working in the oyster industry in New South Wales and Queensland. Sorry. So, on several occasions, the Cutty Soista cafe, which operated in Richmond in Melbourne, had its windows smashed. As people filled the cafe proprietor, was a Custer Elysian, who was a Custer Elysian, Michael Conness was an Italian enemy alien. So to protect his business and disabuse onlookers of the false presumption of the disloyal alien status, Cunice employed a signwriter to make it clear on whose side he was on. Framed by British and Australian flags, the bold signage reads, "The proprietor of this establishment is a naturalized British subject formerly of Greek nationality." and an identification poster that showcases the Greek flag is visible on the shop crump window beneath, and a well-dressed waiter, Canis's nephew, Constantian Zervas, stands proudly at the front of the establishment and stares directly back at the photographer. The signage acts as a vivid, albeit nuanced and personal example of how and why a Greek migrant shows to outwardly present settlement and imperial loyalty while still referring to their Greek heritage. The cartooning contrast that picks eight disheveled, hairy men surrounding an oversized unopened oyster that represents the landmass of Australia. The dark faces and scheming smiles, they huddled together gleefully waiting for a bulky beady-eyed man with a mustache representing an established Greek oyster saloon proprietor to forcefully shuck Australia open with a hammer and chisel. The accompanying caption reads, "Australia is my oyster and I will open it," says the Daigo, a racializing slur, which I've written about in the volume redirecting ethnic singularity that has had a wide, by this stage, trans-specific circulation. So here by a racial escapes and that vividly positions Greeks on the periphery of white racial acceptability, Greeks are represented as a teaming board that if left to their own devices, engulf the continent for themselves. To my mind, the photograph and cartoon communicate something of the messiness and richness of Greek lives in white Australia, what we could think of as the making of a migrant comes settler lives. This is the making of a sense of lib permanency in the settler colonial culture that is often made as a reactive response to the racialization's experience, perhaps the Bolton, yeah? So in this regard, when viewed in tandem, the photograph and cartoon capture great migrant relations with their new homeland. And they challenge us to think about how and why non-dominant groups come to hold on to their hyphenated identities. One image points to how Greek representations outwardly conform to the expectation of white Australia. The other reveals how racism sharply disassociates them from fully partaking. Together, they suggest how the making of Greek Australia was tied to overlapping and intersecting global historical processes, tied to mobility and loyalties of empire, of race, of nation, and of border crossings. Okay, so to my first mural, which is called the Spirit of St. Peter's, which is a suburb in Sydney. The mural here, the pics, the business of Chris and Mariana Antonin, who set up Australian history Australia's famous Antonio Filo pastry business. The first Filo pastry business to commodify, if you will, Filo pastry to be bought en masse in the supermarkets. They came from Cyprus and their narrative very much fits that model migrant one that I mentioned earlier. The business has recently celebrated 60 years of operation. It's still in generational hands. And the photograph here is a depiction of their engagement ceremony. Antonio Filopastry has become what we could think of as part of a diasporic food way in Australia, in which say culinary cultures are retained and reworked become part of an embodied sense of greatness across their norations. The product is available as I said in supermarkets. And I increasingly notice the various variations, if you will, of what's included in phyllo pastry, right? We're moving far beyond you know, feta and spinach. To another mural, this one is created by a group called Greek Youth Generator and it depicts a range of businesses that operated in a suburb in Sydney called Footscray, a suburb that witnessed a lot of Greek migration, particularly in the 50s and 60s, and then subsequently a lot of Vietnamese and then Somalian migration. So this mural is being set up at a moment in which the sense of Greekness is being forgotten. Greek youth generated notes for example that the very first Greeks have settled in Footscray early last century to merely be forgotten. They were mainly working-class people in search of a better life helping each other adjust to their new home. By the post-war the suburb was bustling with Britmus and this is the focus of the suburb's latest mural called Hidden Hellenism and I've you know, contested the instigators to see how hidden is a hidden Hellenism when it's painted up on a wall like this. It depicts Conway's Fish Trading Truck, Thomas Papadopoulos, a bazooki player. It also depicts this young girl here with her father who ran the Olympic hot donut store which is a sort of a famous donut shop next to the station. And so popular was this donut shop that when the council had to redesign the station, you know, the local residents actively fought to ensure that the business was maintained. So to conclude, I hope I'm going somewhere in revealing that the making of Greek diasporic visual cultures is made up of many desperate elements and molded by a range of influences and now, influences. Younger members of Australia's many Greek diasporas are asserting their identities and and reworking narratives of migrant contribution, hard work, family, and regional specificities. Fish, donut, and pastry shops, as well as individual business acumen, advanced claims of respectable entrepreneurial spirit, as well as historical ties to bazooki, the love shared between a husband and wife, and intergenerational ties to suburban heritage correlate with assertions that Greek culture are in jewels abroad, or bring it increasingly, if not completely detethered from the ideal or physical side of Greece. Homeland solidarities and cultural attributes are therefore muffled, magnified, and given fresh connotations, but they are not nearly substituted for an assimilationist positioning within Australia. And for this reason, I see the making and remaking of Greek diasporic cultures by the terrain of murals as part of a multifaceted and pluralistic process of settler colonial cultural becoming. A becoming that is characteristic of a migrant-cum-settler diasporic blending that is tethered to an imagined trans-historical link to homeland, but is increasingly tied to proud local heritages to the sites of settlement. So, returning to mother mural in Sydney, and now taking our gaze to this mural you have in front of you, I want to make a juxtaposing point. Here, you see a mural on Dundermara Hall, only a few blocks from the St. Peter's Antonio mural I showed earlier. The Gondemara Hall here is beautified by the work of a Palestinian Syrian artist and refugee called Mahmoud Salaman. The mural, as you can see, depicts a refugee boat being greeted by another boat steered by indigenous peoples. It challenges the dominant cultural perspective, which has traditionally ensured that both indigenous and migrant history is still largely occupied by marginal spaces and the settler colonial framing of Australian society and culture. In doing so, the mural captures what Aboriginal historian and writer Tony Burch describes as the benefit for migrant communities to recognize what is held in common with Indigenous peoples, a refusal, he says, to accept the status of marginalisation. Indeed, the visual cultures here today suggest that diasporic cultures existed and co-exists in a layering of multiple historical contexts. Diasporic worlds where identity was and continues to be framed by family and work, when migrants are able to construct lives full of meaning that connected them to multiple diographies and locally specific allegiances. Murals in Sydney and Foots in Sydney and Melbourne, to racialist photography and cartoons from the early 20th century. I hope I'm going some way in revealing that by looking at diasporic culture productions, there's a potential for examining the transculturalism that animate and enliven, I think, our interest here in decolonizing approaches to diaspora. I think I'll leave it there and pass it on to Penelope, but thank you very much.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you very much Adonis and thank you for providing the visuals. Really intriguing. Penelope, the floor is all yours.
Penelope Papailias
Great, thank you and thank you for the invitation to be part of this excellent conversation. Especially I want to thank Will for having the patience to put us all together and also for coordinating us and also for noting the April 21st dark anniversary. I think it is really important that we're having this conversation. So I have the advantage that I read the papers before and there's a lot on the table so that should give the audience of this the webinar a little time to process what they've heard. even though I did read them and have time to think about them, I have to admit that I struggled initially to think about what would be a good point of entry into a discussion about decolonizing diaspora. Where do we start and whom are we addressing? Are we talking about decolonizing diaspora or decolonizing diaspora studies? Or are we talking about how diaspora experience might contribute to a decolonizing agenda more generally. And if so, decolonizing what exactly? Our epistemologies, Greece, Europe, our contemporary age of brutalism, to invoke chilling formulation, to invoke decolonization without a path to intervene in the politics of the present also risks reducing centuries of decolonial action and thought to symbolic capital. A coin albeit given moment with diminishing returns but a coin circulating within the walls of Western universities. The genealogies of settler colonialism and genocidal nationalism that shaped Western universities are of course not past history. They're actively defended. The Israeli genocide in Gaza is only the most visible reminder that pressing on with these questions with this kind of research is imperative. At the same time, working at the margins of official state-based knowledge structures and drawing on diasporic and after this conversation, I would say archipelagic experiences, archives, and networks is theoretically a potent multiplier of the decolonial agenda. And this very conversation across so many time zones, so many institutions, enacts that very possibility. Of course, more from the knots, and this is something I understood from reading the position papers, is that in diaspora studies and in diaspora communities, which are at once subjects, consumers, authors, and sometimes funders of that research, That is not the case. It's not a multiplier of the coloniality, whether in the form of inclusion in settler colonialist states through liberal multiculturalism as white ethnics, which I'm don't necessarily so subscribed, or through or one aspect of one possibility of what he discussed, or through a union with Greece anti-colonialism as described in F.T.H.I.A's paper, the colonial framework can remain intact. Modernity as coloniality in Walter Magnolo's formulation, the nation and ethnicity as essentially colonial forms of classification and borderization and white supremacy are not called out, not challenged, dismantled, and moved beyond. For this reason, I think it might be worth returning to scholars writing in the 1990s who to Dr. Anand Dilla's and Kateri's theorized diasporas minor knowledge, join on their work on the minor literature, a space of political dissent and cultural critique that can dynamite dominant nation centered institutions, languages and regimes of citizenship and legibility from within those structures. So Decolonize Halas itself emerged from this kind of a diasporic network, academics speaking from nomadic sites, in our case, anthropologists and provincial universities, as opposed to the sedentary, territorially secure, royal historians, and as one of Europe's first colonial laboratories. Six years later, Greece's role in upholding the white side of history is written plainly in its positionality within the US-Israeli war on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. But that has to do with Greek Greece. That's not our topic today. So reflecting on these papers, I wanted to center the potentially productive disorientation, this not knowing where to start, who we're talking to, trying to bring together all these different points of view. the disorientation of trying to bring together decolonizing and diaspora by centering the problem of belonging. And this word sort of resurfaced. It was like maybe if I did like a word search, the word that was in both the papers the most. You know, these are quotes from the papers, navigating belonging, competing visions of belonging, multiple regimes of belonging, feeling a sense of belonging by literally marking, painting the country that they to which they had moved positioning the existence of other spheres of experiential life and belonging or one can be removed from these relations of power and don't use whole discussion of rootedness. This sort of sense of frustrated suspension and a fraught belonging. This might sound crazy, but this brought to mind, to my mind, lyrics from Bob Marley's song Buffalo Soldier. Stolen from Africa, brought to America. Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival. My classmate in Michigan, and a shout out to Michigan for hosting this conversation. The Haitian American anthropologist Gina Afina Ulysses, one of our keynote performers at the 2021 Decolonized Holacimposium, made me actually hear the lyrics of the song that we all know, but most of us probably haven't thought about what the lyrics say. When I interviewed her for the introduction to a short volume, which is only the second work by Black anthropologists translated into Greek, a whole other topic than that. So of course I don't want to conflate migration histories with those of chattel slavery, but Marley's existential questions about the deracinated Black cowboy, the dreadlocked rust of the post-plantation Caribbean, enlisted to exterminate the Indigenous as part of the campaign of American manifest destiny, resonated with some of the problems discussed in this in these papers. The sense of out of placeness of complicity in power structures that have disempowered and displaced them in the first place that oyster-shucking day ago in Andoni's paper of how even to do history out of the box across continents and seas. Marley, if you know your history then you would know where you where you're coming from then you wouldn't have to ask me who the heck do I think I am. So similarly diaspora experiences described in Andonais and Niftikiya's papers disoriented by stripping narratives of self and community of origins, chronologies, languages, audience that anchor national narratives. And we might add the kinds of archives that sustain them, those that territorialize and borderize belonging. Recognizing that many diasporas were created or accelerated by colonial violence, whether forced migration, slavery, economic displacement, refugee crisis, means refusing to treat the out of placeness, this out of placeness as an ahistorical ontological conviction. This recognition however does not automatically produce solidarity across displaced and dispossessed peoples, nor does it necessarily lead to relationality to the open boat in Edward Wesson's terms, nor does it guarantee an anti-historicist critical engagement with the the past of the kind proposed by Walter Benjamin, this idea of history as catastrophe, as an unresolved violence or as Marley's words, I mean it when I analyze the stench to me, it makes all out of sense. So it's suggested by the two papers, colonial logic pressures the Aspero communities to simulate, to rank their own cultures as inferior, to internalize shame and at times to become settlers themselves. Decolonizing though, does not mean simply identifying against racism. This is the key point. That move risks returning one full circle back into nationalism, into ethnic pride, into whiteness. And Donate's examples of the murals is telling in exactly this way, how liberal narratives of multicultural inclusion with which diaspora communities and often diaspora studies are complicit, displace and obscure questions of territoriality, land claims and participation in settler colonialism. This is where the post-colonial emphasis on imaginaries, the Orientalist Balkanist turn is not enough. As we argue in Greek colonialities, the volume by the colonized Hellas, we need to turn to the materialities of land, it's grabbing, it's naming, it's exploitation, it's inhabitation. We also need to understand race and white supremacy as a structuring category of global power and political economy based in the logic of the plantation. Indeed race might be the key to Elvira's story in Oftahia's paper. Why indeed could she never imagine herself as Egyptian, only as Greek or Italian or as not Italian? Is the absence of colonial nostalgia for Italian rule among the Dagonese Greeks in Egypt a critique of modernity as coloniality, of the coloniality of power, of whiteness? What relation, for instance, did the Dagonese Greeks and Egypt have to the continent export economy and finance capital of late Ottoman and British occupied Egypt, particularly through the 19th and early 20th century boom and cotton production and its integration into imperial credit and trade networks. What was their view, let's say on the Suez crisis of 1956? What am I imagine a different realization then that Ottomanness connected the decanates to Egypt through maritime networks to imagine oneself as Egyptian would be to risk in quotes identification as black and Ottoman, opening the path to interrogating the historical white name of Greek populations and their non inevitable alignment with global white supremacy. To include, I would like to point out two things. First the need for deeper engagement with decolonial thought in black radical traditions. Reflecting on the decolonized last special session at the last MGSA meeting made clear to me that this discussion within model Greek cities has not fully moved beyond the post of the 90s. Something that is necessary for a good take, if we're going to take the colonizing diaspora seriously. The initiative to host this conversation is a very important step in that direction. Secondly, I want to underline the importance of the personal family and community archives, photographs, identity documents, murals mentioned in these papers in which the authors have painstakingly studied and often it seems gathered themselves. These fragile and yet resilient archives often interstitial through state and national archives and institutions of memory can sustain alternative affiliations, experiences, cosmologies, and cartographies. They can be instrumental to an archipelagic connectivity that land-centered national historiography has divided and enclosed. They are valuable resources that not only can be read against the grain, but also against other archival formations. So maybe we can reverse Marley's phrase, if you know where you're coming from, you will know your history. Thank you.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you very much, Penelope. Really multidimensional and intriguing set of reflections on the two position papers and while I invite the audience to start reflecting on some of these core issues, please do put your questions into the Q&A tab and we will address those in the remaining time. Before we do so, I now want to invite Efihi and Adonis to reflect back and respond to Penelope's reflections.
Andonis Piperoglou
You first, Efihi, please.
Eftychia Mylona
Yeah, okay. Thank you so much, Penelope, for your thoughts and reflections. Yes, many things to think about, I'll start with Elvira's case because this is I guess the most intriguing why she couldn't imagine herself as Egyptian and I think there are several aspects and forms of inclusion and exclusion happening simultaneously. First, in relation with the Egyptian state and its policies, especially in the post-independence period, like in the post-50s let's say, then in relation to the Greek state, the Greek communities as institutions and the education they provided for many years, for example up to the 50s, the Arabic culture, the Arabic language were dismissed, they were not important, people were not learning actively. Many of my interlocutors that were older in age commented that men that would go outside in the street working, they would speak a bit of Amiya, the Egyptian dialect, but that's it. So you didn't need the language in order to survive, to communicate, etc. This changed later in the late 1950s when Gamal al-Dinasser introduced Arabic, Arabic culture at schools, it became mandatory, etc. So there is the capital, Greek language, Greek education, the Greek institutions carried and Greeks grew up with that. So looking down basically at Egyptian Arabic, at Egyptian culture, and why this could be a point, but also there is the element of race and class. So it depends who are you asking and where is this person? For example, I interviewed a lot of suez canal greeks that were primarily working class communities that lived in Arab neighborhoods, worked next to Egyptians and were very much at the bottom of this hierarchy below the French and the British. So they had very different experiences as working class Greeks compared to Alexandrian Greeks for example that grew up in confined kind of you know Greek quarters and had a particular education engaged with the Egyptian culture in a specific way. So to answer this I think Elvira, first of all, couldn't imagine because it became kind of very difficult to obtain Egyptian citizenship, first of all, after the fifties, due to the policies, new labor policies, citizenship policies, etc. But second, it was the education she received and also the cultural capital, the class and the race that intersected in that. I'll give the floor to Adonis to move on to the second point before I continue.
Andonis Piperoglou
Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful response to our papers. There is a lot in it. I will start with this, this conundrum we have about where we're starting from. And I think I'll answer it maybe in two ways. One is that, I think there's speaking as a trained historian, as I said at the start, I think there's too much scholarship that has done this work of defining what a diaspora is, the Greek diaspora, and not enough work on examining what diasporas do. And so I think historians are now coming to doing this, historicization. So what we're starting from here then is to really take seriously diaspora as a category of analysis that stems off, if you will, the subaltern turn in tandem with the turn of the Birmingham school, right? Stuart Hall, Catherine Hall, right, you know, there are really interesting academic genealogies. I'll just mention another one, just not because of name job, but because of the context by which these things happened. The Peschakrabati was trained in Australia very much, you know, in response to Aboriginal activism and processes. Aboriginal activism and resistance in Australia is always in dialogue, has always been in dialogue with African American civil rights. So I guess what I'm saying here is by taking more encompassing, more pluralistic framing of diaspora in our academic context, I think we have something to speak and offer diasporas plural. And then I by extension then I think that actually Hellas broadly speaking Greek, Greeks, Greeknesses, but the Mediterranean is a great starting point to examine diaspora. Right? Lebanese, Italian, British, Egyptian, multiple languages intersecting colonialism. We've sort of noted that here today. We could throw the French in there too. Right? So dynamics producing global mobilities that in turn lead to particular migrant cultures that intergenerationally shift into diasporic realities today. And so then to ride on a few other things that you've mentioned, which I really want to, you've introduced a new word to me Penelope, which is a great thing, but the archipelagic, right? So I can't help but think of the pelagic in the context of the Black Atlantic and Paul Gilroy, right? Is this the right word? I'm not quite sure, but it's certainly one that is generative and it's certainly one, whether it's, well, I'm trying to think through as I'm speaking, the archipelagic and the pelagic, but I'm more familiar with the pelagic. So what I'm going to say here is that the pelagic is detethered from land. It's not fixed to land. It's sitting above the seabed and below the sea surface. And so taking seriously the roots and rootedness going to the ROUTES really matters then in thinking about migration and then by extension diasporizations, right? They're not the same thing. And then I can find a beautiful link with FT here, although I mentioned my own family's connection. If we just, that is the Dada Kinese, these people from Gasolorizo go through Port Said onwards to Ceylon, then onwards to Australia, right? They use the roots of empire because there is a viable life elsewhere. So I know of my paper trying to do a lot here, very much grounded as a late 19th century and early 20th century historian, but speaking to you with your radical anthropological training, you know, is to say you force me and the theorizations, both in sociology and anthropology, my sister disciplines, if you, if you will, to give me new vernaculars that allow historical inquiry to do better, to not conform to the nation's state historicization, to break from the assimilative multicultural contributed narrative, to be more attentive to the pluralisms, interconnections, encounters, etc, etc. Okay, one final thing I just wanted to say to your beautiful paper, which obviously makes me want to just hang out with a dreadlock rasta, is to also say that if we're thinking about these tensions of belonging, this sort of frustration of not quite been belonging, never really belonging, maybe the hyphen is in here, maybe that's something that is inherently diasporic, probably. But one thing that the work of Gasan Haji shared the cover of his book, the diasporic conditions, ethnographic explorations of the Lebanese in the world, has introduced to me, and this is, and then I guess, tacking on to your out of placeness. This is something I have experienced. I'm trying to see and yourself have too in your various in your various lives, in your rather dispersed lives, right? Is to say as much as that outer placeness is felt, there is a huge coming to after bra mentioned by here about this sense of homing, right? This sense of space then, local conditions of the life actually of growing up diasporic. Harge introduces me to this concept of linticular realities and so I just share this and stop there is to say. The linticular photograph is the photograph where you know you you tilt it one way, it's a frown, you tilt it the other way, it's a smile, or perhaps there's distances of intensity, you know, they're closer or back. Now, we could go to any diasporic setting, Greek or otherwise, and when you can locate within the very personal intimate space of the home, a myriad of things that will take you to the imagined homeland. And he argues, and I think quite convincingly, that that does take you to the homeland, that in the one space are two realities, right? And so outside of the rigidity bound by the various forms of coloniality that go into the making and perpetual making of the nation state, in the lived experience the diasporian is a remaking of a Greekness that is organic, what I'm saying, to Australian. Right? That there is something very interesting for me in thinking about multiple realities and that you are out of place and in place simultaneously. Yeah, thank you though.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you very much Adonis. I'm mindful of time but I'm also aware that my technical problem led to starting slightly later but I'm also really conscious of digital fatigue and our lovely technician's time. So I propose that I give a minute to Penelope to respond to the two reflective corpus of new ideas and I truly want to honor the wonderful questions in our Q&A. So I will also read those and then give some space for Vicky and Adonis to respond to those questions. And then I'll defer to my organizer will for any closing remarks, if that's okay with everybody. It's been such an intellectually absorbing and emotionally fulfilling hour and a half that it feels like a minute and a half. So watch the space there will be more to follow. Pinalopy, would you like to go?
Penelope Papailias
I mean, I have so much to say that I feel like I should just cede my time.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you. That's very generous. Yeah, I mean, I have like a long list here, but
Penelope Papailias
I know I have fear to open my mouth. I mean, maybe I'll speak later.
Anastasia Christou
Okay, so what I'll do, I'm not even gonna glance at my two page of questions, but I'm going to definitely go to the Q&A and read the questions in the Q&A and then give all our speakers an opportunity for a minute or so if that's okay. Wonderful. So I can see that we have contributions and they're named contributions so I'm assuming our colleagues don't want to be anonymous. Vasiliki, Canzara, hello. First, thank you for the very interesting papers. I would like to ask if the issue of nostalgia plays a role in rootedness or feeling Greek in diaspora in the context of your work. I say this for I lived in many years in Amsterdam where the common characteristic of the Greeks and inverted commas at the organization called Greek Community that united them in some way, negating somehow all differences, parenthesis of origin, gender, or age, was what exactly a sense of nostalgia. And another wonderful question by Christos Hadzianis. Thank you all so much. Three brilliant papers. I have a question for Adonis. As you know, a lot has been written about how photography is a colonial technology. Is this something that interests you? How this colonial technology replicates colonial structures but can also be used for anti-decolonial purposes? In general, we'd love to hear more about how you approach photography in your work. And I'll do the reverse and start with the donis, Tijia, Penelope, and then we'll close this,
Andonis Piperoglou
our wonderful event. Thank you. Photography, yes, very interested in it. I'm minded in art history and I like the visual medium. Perhaps I'll respond to that question within the context of border control and the use of photography and border control in relation to obviously the passport but also in then applications for citizenship and naturalization. So increasingly the photograph became stapled to the application and now it's a technology, right, of surveillance and monitoring and cross checking at the border. But what it also, what it also permits, if you will, is an immense intimacy into a life. So I just sort of sank talking about it in relation to method that a historian using the post-colonial and you know, decolonial methods and conceptual approaches that many of which have been mentioned today, then can can re-examine such kind of controlling forms of surveillance and border control to get to more intimate accounts of expressivity and and diasporic life. And so there, you know, I would point to the wonderful work of George Corvados. But also then to the, and this is a beautiful thing about the kind of vision of decolonize at Elas is also then how our artists creatively rework the archive using not only if you will photography as a colonial form replicates as you say but also then to kind of flip it back is that say the family photograph as a counter archive that resists right the national colonial framing. To nostalgia I just will briefly respond to that in the sense that nostalgia, at least my understanding of it, and relation to rootedness, which is an interesting framing here, but if I'm following the question, there's something about this sense of loss to something that was better, right, the sense of something that is gone that was it was better back then. And this is really being replicated by these later generations of the kind of 50s, 60s migrant generation, these great grandchildren, great grandchildren who genuinely feel this sense of nostalgia to the lives of their parents. And maybe, you know, a war and a global oil crisis contributes to that. You know, that life is definitely more difficult for these younger generations. The idea of like migrating with very little in your pocket to establish yourself, set up a business, and then sort of your children, the next generation upward social mobility become that successful Australian. That dream is no longer. And so I think people rightly, I think, you know, in a very interesting way, when I say rightly, I think it's natural for people to coming to the ending of Penelope's thing to want to try to recount and know their histories, histories that have been, that they're disassociated from. And so that just the ending point here of the nostalgia and the kind of reference to the Greek club in Amsterdam, I mean, this is replicated, there's some weird proclivity Greek hubs are setting up their clubs, and then the clubs, in a way, become outlets for a very rigid bounded form of greatness. And yet the everyday life of people outside of that club, right, resists that very bounded form of greatness. So, you know, we're responding to nostalgia and things that were once better, perhaps, in different ways. And I wouldn't say that it often happens in the club, in the club room, maybe for a bunch of particular men, but anyway, thank you for your question.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you Adonis. I have to hear any reflections on the nostalgia question or otherwise.
Eftychia Mylona
Yes, thank you very much for the question. Yes, definitely nostalgia plays a role. Also, how people remember because you know I conducted a lot of oral history accounts and people remember you know in the now the past so memories are only existing plural and there are multiple you know and collective memories also so it depends on the topic what my experience was with my interlocutors is like, "Norstarcha might come," in the sense of, yes, things might be, might have been better back then, but also some of them try to romanticize the presence as well after being there, after resisting, after surviving. We are not the ones who left, you know? We are the ones who made it here. So this produces another narrative. And me being there as a researcher, you know, asking questions also make them kind of say sometimes their success story. So it depends, you know, what kind of topic, field, where the person comes from, again, the class, very important element. You know, if they reproduce nostalgia or if they they romanticize the presence instead of the past. Just to give you a short answer to this, thank you.
Anastasia Christou
- Thank you, Tichia. Last but certainly not least of all, Pin and Lopy.
Penelope Papailias
- Okay, now I had a moment to break it down into three little bullet points. The first is I really wanna thank you guys. And this is then our topic about what's going on in the Greek conversation, but I really wanna make clear how, I mean, I say it a million times and I'll keep saying it, like I teach at a department of history, archeology, social anthropology, where we do not teach the history of Asia, Africa, North America and South America. And whenever I bring this up, it's kind of like, well, you know, if we had a discussion about slavery and we had the kids go through school books and there's only one line about the history of slavery, then like, but do we need to have it in this clergy? So thinking about this, like the kind of connections that you make or the intersect, you know, the work with indigenous scholars that Andonis does and thinks the idea of the Mediterranean connections with Italy and all these things are so important on this end, it's not our topic, I just want to say it. Second of all, one thing I really got from this, it reminded me of the work of actually my professor from the University of Michigan, Anne Stoller, who worked on this idea of colonial elites moving through different imperial French colonies and moving colonial knowledges. But it's interesting to think of migrants in that light. I found it really interesting to think about how of the movement into all these different colonial settings and what they're bringing back. I mean, in a way, I myself am bringing something into Greece or coming in, I think I mentioned this stuff to here, and there's some messages we exchanged before this. In Volos we have the Egyptians, who were these returning, and they were still referred to as this house of an Egyptian, and they brought servants, the idea of servants. They created a big club. They brought rowing, they did all these things. But they also, they definitely brought neoclassical buildings in parts of Pylion, which didn't have, in Volos they didn't have those kind of buildings. They brought ideas of whiteness too. So we need to know these connections, but it's interesting to look at it from those subjects, not from the colonial elites, but from the migrants as circulating within these different colonial, within the British empire, different sort of places that Adonis was talking about. And the other thing I really liked about Adonis paper of like these, that sort of more temporary roots in Hodge's comment, because obviously, you also can't be always displaced, the slave, what is it? There's no land, they've lost their land. So like the history of maranage, for instance, like what kind of alliances have been made? What kind of, sometimes I was intrigued by the book, the more than human diasporas, I want to check that out. Like where can we find those traditions of a, you know, of a rooting, but maybe in a sort of, in alliances and, you know, different kind of inhabitation, not a colonial inhabitation that might be from the diasporic, you know, because they can't be indigenous, but they're there, but sort of recognizing that particularly out of placeness, but sort of superficial rooting, it was very interesting. So I thank you for these insights.
Anastasia Christou
- Thank you very much, Penelope. I want to conclude by saying that I'm really grateful sticking with us beyond the timing. But I think this is such a rich conversation. And I feel so energized that in the symbolic darkness of this particular date in the calendar year, it's been so illuminating. The discussion that we've had just illuminates the interdisciplinary dialogues that we need to continue to have when it comes to anti-fascist discourse, liberatory discourse, and wider discourses when it comes to epistemic violence, but also transformative potential for critical pedagogies to emerge, what Penelope just told us about university education and how can we decolonize our curricula across the globe. There's so much research and all tools, historical, archaeological, anthropological, sociological, are imperative to be in dialogue, to continue to excavate and dismantle the historical ruins and historical toxicity of oppressive colonial empire regimes. Thank you so much for making this first start with us. And hopefully there will be second and third and fourth continuous dialogues and maybe textual arguments and publications. Greece, Hellas, needs to be decolonized in so many other places in the world today. And we need to dislodge from the nation state as an epistemological and methodological figure. Thank you so much. I feel just completely at all. Will, what do you think?
Will Stroebel
- Yeah, thank you so much, everyone. And as Anastasia said, this is just the beginning of our conversations. The Modern Greek Studies Association, Transnational Studies Committee plans to continue these webinars and we will send news as the forthcoming second webinar take shape in the coming months of summer. So stay tuned and more to come.
Andonis Piperoglou
Thank you. It's an honor to be in your company everyone. Thank you. It's merging on 2am so I'm gonna dart off but I'll be in touch with you all. It's been really nice.
Anastasia Christou
Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye guys. Bye.