About the lecture

This talk will probe the connection between literary and legal modes of belonging in the Modern Greek sphere. How and when do writers come to be thought of as Greek, and how and when do they not? What happens when they abandon Greece, or are abandoned by it—in, for instance, one of the removals of nationality that affected tens of thousands of erstwhile Greek citizens during the 20th century, excluded because they were members of ethnic and/or political minorities? What does it mean to claim someone as a Greek writer, and what does it do to our under­standing of their work, to the way we approach it, to the things we see in it? In thinking of nationality, citizenship, and literary belonging together, and in stressing the incessant move­ment of so many of the writers whose work has been granted entry into the Greek literary sphere, this talk seeks to denaturalize the category of “Greek writer” and to recognize the ways in which the construction of that literary sphere has interacted with shift­ing legal frame­works and sociopolitical understandings of who counts as Greek.