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

Year 1999, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 0 - 0, 01.06.1999

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 J. Friedman (1994), Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage Publications, p. 118.
• 2 J. Friedman, op. cit., p. 119.
• 3 J. Friedman, op. cit., p. 119.
• 4 P. M. Michas (1977), ‘From “Romios” to “Hellene” (or Greek): A Study in Social Discontinuity,’ MA thesis, Århus University, p. 20, quoted in J. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 119.
• 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 J. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 120.
• 7 T.K. Dimaras (1977), The Neohellenic Enlightenment, Athens: Hermes, p. 60.
• 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 J. Friedman, (1994), Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 122