Description
As a classicist, I have always been exposed to a very particular image of Greece: the ancient image. In the tourism sector, through official government channels, and in popular culture, too, the wider world is also exposed to a very similar conception of Greece, focused around the ancient world and past, and largely ignoring the rest of Greek history. This is deeply problematic, passing over hundreds of years of Byzantine, Islamic, and later historical events and people to present an image of Greece that is largely racialised as white and contributes to white supremacist uses of the ancient world both within Greece and outside of it. However, in recent years, academics, artists and activists have been working against this privileging of the ancient. Thanos Anastopoulos, in his 2022 Φαντάσματα της Επανάστασης ('Travelling Ghosts'), takes 18th century ghosts from the ruins of Trieste, an Italian city with a large Greek community and strong presence in Greece's revolutionary history, and sets them loose in the modern city, anachronisms in Covid-Era Greece. I examine how, through this exploration of alternative ghosts to the government-sanctioned ancient past, an alternative space is made for the creation of Greek identity and appreciation of the layers of Greek culture, history, and the past. Memory as commemoration is an active choice, and it is who we choose to remember, who our walking ghosts are, that defines us for the present.| Period | 13 May 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | CIMS Postgraduate Symposium ‘Cultural Identity, Memory, and Images’ : CIMS Symposium 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | St Andrews, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Greece
- Cultural Identity, Heritage, Memory
- film and memory