A DIALOGUE OF PAST AND PRESENT: THE CONSTRUCTION AND RE PRESENTATION OF GREEK NATIONAL IDENTITY, Leonard A. STONE

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.