{"id":2054,"date":"2020-12-17T13:49:16","date_gmt":"2020-12-17T11:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newurl\/new-site\/?page_id=2054"},"modified":"2021-04-26T20:21:52","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T17:21:52","slug":"nation-race","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/decolonizehellas.org\/en\/nation-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Nation \u2014 Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”NATIO\u0418\u2014RA\u00c7E” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]That modern Greece did not have colonies or slave plantations does not mean that contemporary discussions of race and racialization are out of place in the Greek context. To the contrary: race is the bedrock of the nation-form. Whiteness and racial supremacy shaped the idea(l) of \u201cancient Greece,\u201d marked the terms of neohellenic modernity and still vitally inform dominant discourses in the Greek public sphere.<\/p>\n

We consider nationalism itself to be an ideology and mode of imagining the world, wherein body, place, time, and history are intricately entangled with colonial imaginaries and practices. As such, our efforts to resist nationalism and the nationalization of our thought, imagination and practice can only be viewed and understood as part of the broader decolonizing project. It is imperative, therefore, to foreground whiteness and racial supremacy as the central ideology and technology of Euro-american governmentality and western capitalism in any discussion of revolution, enlightenment, modernity, knowledge — indeed of \u201cEurope.\u201d[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”1967″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Illustration from Types of Mankind<\/em> (1854) by American slaveowner, surgeon and physical anthropologist Josiah Clark Nott and American Egyptologist George Robins Gliddon. Source: Library of Congress.<\/span><\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Accordingly, this cluster will explore contemporary research that is bringing critical race theory into conversation with the classics to confront the disciplines, institutions and practices that \u201cwhitened\u201d and Europeanized classical heritage. Furthermore, it will examine how this racialized legacy might connect to various forms of indigenous Hellenisms and how \u201cwhiteness\u201d as a racialised ideology of identification with civilisation and modernity might have worked in the modern Greek national project as a whole. Secondly, acknowledging the instrumentality of the nation form to European colonial expansion and (now waning) global domination might enable us to reframe extensive anthropological, historical, archaeological, literary and linguistic research – as well as artistic interventions – on issues of nationalism, nation-making, minorities and ethnic, linguistic and religious discrimination. Through this optic, neglected aspects of the history of Greek nationhood and contemporary exclusions, racism and fascist violence could be (re)viewed in relation to global contemporary activist and intellectual interrogations and refutations of colonial afterlives, white supremacy and anti-blackness.<\/p>\n

Some of the questions that could jumpstart investigations and collaborations in this cluster are the following:<\/p>\n