A DIALOGUE OF PAST AND PRESENT: THE CONSTRUCTION AND RE PRESENTATION OF GREEK NATIONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

This article briefly explores the parameters of the process of Greek national identification and the practice of self-identification in specific social, political and global conditions. The construction of a history of Greek national identity is the construction of a meaningful universe of events and narratives, for a collectively defined subject. What has supposedly occurred in the past produces a relation between ‘what came before’ and ‘what is’. Such a process can be interpreted as a dialogue between past and present. A dialogue which, employing the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s perspective, achieves a voice and point or points of view. An implicit dialogue, no less, of responses to actual, imagined or potential global forces. Such a dialogue can be understood at the level of structural conditions in which shifting identities are identified, assimilated, marginalised or rejected.

References

1. 1 J. Friedman (1994), Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage Publications, p. 118.
2. 2 J. Friedman, op. cit., p. 119.
3. 3 J. Friedman, op. cit., p. 119.
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5. 5 R. Just (1989), ‘Triumph of the Ethnos’ in Tonkin, E ., McDonald, M. and Chapman, M. (eds.), History and Ethnicity, London: Routledge, p. 78.
6. 6 J. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 120.
7. 7 T.K. Dimaras (1977), The Neohellenic Enlightenment, Athens: Hermes, p. 60.
8. 8 M. Bernal (1987), Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, London: Vintage. [Readers may be interested in a review of this book published in Perceptions, Vol. II No. 1, March-May 1997, Ed.]

9. 9 J. Friedman, (1994), Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 122