10.13125/2039-6597/2628
Travel writing has been viewed as one of the main sources of national typologies and is often held responsible for the consolidation of stereotypes about otherness and for the promotion of an imperialist agenda. This paper aims to investigate conceptions of Greekness in contemporary Greek travelogues which involve a rethinking of stereotypical national representations. The analysis proceeds by proposing the method of “questioning home” in travelogues through diffracted gazes towards the traveller’s homeland as a result of his encounter with otherness. In the second part, Greekness is explored beyond the nation-state approach and the long-held national stereotype of the “Greek particularism”, Greece’s isolation because of the country’s unresolved tension between East and West. A. Vistonitis’ and M. Kassolas’s travelogues reporting their travels to the East (China) and to the West (USA) respectively at the end of the 20th century are examined as case-studies. Through narrators’ dialogues with their hosts and the raising of relevant political and geopolitical issues, “transnational” conceptions of Greek identity are explored: the notions of “diaspora”, “cosmopolitan citizenship”, “openness” and “connectivity” challenge the national narration based on “purity” and “exclusion”, and facilitate the investigation of potential roles for Greece in the globalized world of the early 21st century. 
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2039-6597
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Peggy Karpouzou
Between
geopolitics
Beyond the East-West Dilemma: Rethinking Greekness Through Diffracted Gazes in Contemporary Greek Travelogues
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
Longing to Belong: the Community
2017-06-02
2017-01-29
2017-06-02
2017-06-02
1
Peggy Karpouzou
2017/06/02
10.13125/2039-6597/2628
"National and kapodistrian University of Athens"
2039-6597
13
geopolitics
en
Beyond the East-West Dilemma: Rethinking Greekness Through Diffracted Gazes in Contemporary Greek Travelogues
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2628/2478
7
     Beyond the East-West Dilemma:
      Rethinking Greekness through
    Diffracted Gazes in Contemporary
            Greek Travelogues
                             Peggy Karpouzou


            1. Questioning the traveller’s homeland
                 in contemporary travelogues
      Τravel writing, according to imagological approaches, has been
one of the main sources of national typologies. The reasoning behind
this was that firstly, the traveller can only perceive what he already
knows and secondly, by writing down his/her account, his/her insight
is standardized (Beller - Leerssen 2007: 449). Furthermore, the rhetoric
of national images of self and other must be related to its functions
within a broader set of political practices. Current criticism has
repeatedly blamed travel writing of the traditional form as «inherently
conventional, Western, Eurocentric and conformist» and for pushing
the imperialist colonial agendas by disseminating powerful discourses
of difference (Edwards - Graulund 2012: 5; cfr. Thomson 2011: 4-6).
      The complex flows of people, goods, information and
technologies across the planet, especially during the last century, have
called into question the traditional ways in which different cultures
have been distinguished and classified. At the end of the 20th century, a
new stance concerning otherness can be identified in contemporary
travel writing which moves beyond the typical for the genre
imperialist vision: the writers are more self-reflexive about how travel



Between, vol. VII , n. 13 (Maggio/ May 2017)
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



and travel texts mingle with ideological positions, technologies of
travel and perception, as well as the established modes of narrating
difference1. Innovative textual practices explore new ways of
addressing these issues in relation to the people and places
encountered.
     In order to avoid the one-sided vision of the host culture, Roland
Barthes proposes in his Travels in China the adoption of a “sideways
gaze”. This gaze observes more than one direction at the same time,
namely it combines in the western traveller’s gaze, the Western and the
non-Western point of view (Barthes 2012: 177; cfr. Westphal 2011: 128) 2.
Nevertheless, Barthes does not take into the account the importance of
the encounter of the traveller with the Other. This encounter with
otherness, which «impels one to come face to-face with the other»,
fractures both a boundary and an apparatus of representation (Islam
1996: vii). The hosts can challenge the cultural imperialism of the
traveller by returning his/her gaze. The Other’s gaze or “host gaze” is
directed towards the traveller, or even towards the traveller’s gaze
upon the host’s community (Moufakkir - Reisinger 2013: xi-xiv) and
may result in the destabilization of preconceived understandings of
otherness and identity. This interactive traveller’s experience is
designated in tourist studies by the interesting concept of “chorasters”.
The latter are travellers who not only bring meaning to the tourist
space (“chora”) from their own position in their own culture but who
also «creatively incorporate into their sense of self the experiences of
interaction with people from different cultural backgrounds in the


     1
         For instance, the narrator’s authority is challenged “through
surprising juxtapositions, non-linear narratives, multiple voicing and
complex configurations of documentation, memory, fact, fiction and fantasy”
(Edwards and Graulung 2012: 10).
      2 By acknowledging the incompleteness of the subject’s gaze in the

imagological or “egocentered” approaches, Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism
proposes the “multifocalization”, i.e. the examination of a multiplicity of
heterogeneous points of view which all converge in a given place (2011: 122-
131).


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                                         Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



tourist space» (see Wearing - Wearing 1996: 235; Ankor - Wearing 2013:
188).
      In the travelogues, the encounter between the traveller and the
host often takes the narrative form of a dialogue between the two
parties, an option which emphasizes their mutual engagement and
their equal relation. Equality between the two parts frequently requires
a repositioning and destabilizing of the privileged observer’s position,
conventionally attributed to the travelling subject. Travel writers
habitually differentiate themselves from those they describe by
situating their authority in a «stable, superior and unquestioned home»
that provides them with a strong sense of identity (Lisle 2006: 137).
This article focuses on the traveller’s self-reflective gaze about his own
homeland, as it is “diffracted” through the gaze upon the host’s
country. In optics, diffraction is a phenomenon in which rays of light
interact to produce new patterns, not just of the same reflected –
displaced– elsewhere. Challenging diffractions of the traveller’s
homeland may be produced when the traveller, through the dialogue
with his/her host, acts as a “choraster”. This often involves a
reassessment of his/her national self-conceptions.
      Greece as a homeland might be considered as an especially
thought-provoking case, due to its complex geopolitical position. It lies
at one of the traditional imaginary geographical borders of East and
West and the East-West dilemma is a part of its identity (see Peckham
2001: 48; Koutsourelis 2016: 4, 6-7). In this article, challenging
conceptions of Greekness and the nation-state model at the end of the
20th century are investigated in Greek travel writing, which is a
relatively unexplored field.3 The works of Mitsos Kassolas, The Other
America (1973) and Anastasis Vistonitis, Beijing: The Rose and the Lotus
(1995), recording travel experiences to the Far West and the Far East
respectively, constitute interesting studies for a number of reasons.



     3
        On the claim for contributions to the under-explored field of Modern
Greek travelogues, see Tziovas 2014: 71. For an introduction to Greek travel
literature, see Panaretou 2002.


                                                                                 3
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



      Firstly, both USA and China represent actual economical and
political poles of great geopolitical importance. As Debbie Lisle
discusses in The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing,
contemporary travelogues participate in, and respond to, the anxieties
created by late 20th-century globalization (2006: 3). They often engage
with familiar struggles about global politics such as the protection of
human rights, the promotion of democracy and the reduction of
inequality. Vistonitis and Kassolas, who are both literary authors and
journalists as well, seized the opportunity to raise in their travelogues
several critical political questions about the world and democracy at
the end of the 20th century and the role of Greece in the global scene.
      Secondly, in both travelogues one may find travellers’ self-
reflections about Greece and Greekness which are triggered through
extended dialogical scenes with their respective hosts in the USA and
China. At the same time, the dialogical form is placed at the heart of
the travelling experience and is reflected even in the travelogues’ titles.
Mitsos Kassolas’ travelogue –which won the First Greek State Travel
Writing Award in 1974– echoes the title of Michael’s Harrington’s
influential book The Other America (1962), a study on poverty and
oppression in the United States. Kassolas reports his personal
experience of America by choosing to focus on immigrants, and
particularly those of Greek origin4. He meditates not only about
contemporary life conditions in the emblematic liberal democracy of
the USA but also about the conception of Greekness, filtered through
this American experience. Anastasis Vistonitis by his travelogue
entitled Beijing: The Rose and the Lotus (1995) makes a reference to
Lindsay’s poem, “The wedding of the rose and the lotus” (1912). This
reference stands as an allegory for the dialogue between the West
(rose) and the East (lotus). Furthermore, his travel report on China is
mediated through references to his previous sojourn in the USA for six
years. Vistonitis – a cosmopolitan poet, who has also published essays


     4
      Mitsos Kassolas was himself one of these Greek immigrants who left
Greece to escape the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974).



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                                        Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



on human rights, liberty, oppression, fascism and cosmopolitanism -
uses these double lenses, the Chinese and the American, when he
meditates about Greekness and democracy at the time of globalization.
      Finally, while travel may be playing a significant part in the
formation of cultures and identities, as Caren Kaplan points out, in the
postmodern world there are very different experiences of
displacement, such as homelessness, tourism, exile, and immigration.
So «displacement is not universally available or desirable for many
subjects, nor is it evenly experienced» (Kaplan 1996: 1; see also Bird et.
al., 1994). The two examined travelogues were also chosen because
they involve the two major types of displacement: the “voluntary”
type, Vistonitis’, and the “compulsory” type, Kassolas’.



                 2. Displacing “Greekness”:
              towards a transnational definition
     Both in the cosmopolitan and the diasporic displacement of the
authors, what is challenged through the dialogues with their hosts is
the conception of Greekness, as it has been constructed since the
establishment of the Modern Greek State in the 19th century. Alongside
the canonical historical national narrations of Spyrídōn Zambelios and
Constantine Paparrigopoulos, namely the History of the Hellenic Nation
(1860-74) in the 19th century, the Modernist literary generation of the
1930s consolidated Greekness as a rather “restrained” notion, like any
other notion of “authentic” identity. It is «an idea of fixed boundaries
and closure: it excludes what is not authentic and true –the non Greek–
and portrays the original, the eternal Hellenic, as an autotelic unity»
(Lambropoulos 1988: 100). Such a conception, mainly concerned about
the “authenticity” of the Greek identity, aspires to “exclusivity” and
the ensuing nationalist rhetoric of “continuity” and “purity” of the
Hellenic nation. It does not tolerate uncertainty, indeterminacy or
openness.




                                                                                5
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



          2.1. Between East and West: From the Modern Greek
                “Particularism” to the Greek idiosyncrasy

      According to the imagological approach, national identities can be
seen as internalized collective self-images taking shape in the structural
context of a Self-Other opposition (Beller –Leerssen 2007: 22). A
number of polar oppositions of modern subject formation are
traditionally included in the conception of Greekness, e.g. ancient/
modern, civilized/barbaric, Oriental/European, central/peripheral.
Once modernity has established its legitimacy on the basis of antiquity,
Greece, although placed at the periphery of Europe, acquired a central
position in the European imagination. The creation of the Modern
Greek state in the 19th century needs to be understood as one of the
most important affirmations of a Western and especially European
identity (Prevelakis 2016: 122; Derrida 1992: 262-263). This somehow
masks the tension between Greece’s mythic status and its ambivalent
historical position at the crossroads of East and West. Greece’s national
imaginary is built upon its conception of belonging somewhere
between East and West: it is supposed to be the West’s familiar
neighbour –it even occupies the singular place of a symbol in European
thought– but, at the same time, it is also “different” by virtue of its
affinities with the Orient.
      After the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire
(1821) and the creation of a modern state, the Other was the Orient.
However, since the publication of the German scholar Fallmerayer’s
controversial theories against the purity of the Greek nation, the
Modern Greeks had to embrace their own Orient, Byzantium, in order
to affirm the unbroken racial and cultural continuity between ancient
and modern Greeks (Gourgouris 1996: 142-43). As a result of this turn
to Byzantinism and to the Orthodox Church, the West became to a
certain degree an “Other”. At the same time, Greece participated in the
modernizing process that affected Europe from the late 18th century
onwards.
      This ambivalent stance towards the West and the complex
Modern Greek national imaginary have usually been examined within



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the problematic of Otherness. For the «consistent necessity of
Neohellenic culture to define itself as “Other to all Others”» (ibid.: 275),
this Modern Greek “particularism”, diverse explanations have been
articulated. According to Gregory Jusdanis, Greece’s self-perceived
otherness, is the result of its “belated modernization” compared to the
other European nation-states. The imported western models did not
function like their European counterparts, and were even resisted quite
often as they clashed with the complex local realities (Jusdanis 1991:
xiii). As a result, Modern Greece views itself as a case apart, as both
inferior and superior to Western culture. On another equally important
axis, the Modern Greeks’ fascination with their ancestors -reiterating
the European classicism- has been expressed at the expense of
contemporary Greek reality. The latter remained underrepresented in
the national identity narration which focused mainly on the idealized
past as an internalized lost utopia without an active link with the
present and the future.
       The topics of Modern Greek particularism, the mythical roots of
national identity and the problematic relation with the rest of the
Europeans occur in Vistonitis’s travelogue when the Chinese host, a
renowned intellectual of his country, engages in a long, in equal terms
conversation with the narrator comparing the Western and the Chinese
civilizations. Besides, China has never been a radical Other for the
West. European travel writers were familiar with the Chinese
civilization and regardless of its exotism, they recognized China as a
place with an evolved civilization and a rich economy (Todorov 1993:
26). The Chinese intellectual encourages the narrator to speak about his
perception of Greekness by claiming that «we all have a general idea
about the Greek world, but it must be different when a Greek describes
it» (Vistonitis 2005: 123). The narrator attempts a national self-
definition by declaring first of all his belief in the values of democracy.
He also exposes what he calls the “Modern Greek paradox” and, as a
final point, the difficulty to fully and exclusively assume a Western
identity:




                                                                                 7
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



            I told him some of the things I believed. That the values of
       democracy are placed above the individual ones, and the interest
       of the community is above the personal one […] about our
       national fights against tyranny, the difference of extent between
       our historical past and our actual geographical space, wherein lies
       the root of the Modern Greek paradox […]. Finally, about the
       Europeans and the problems we have with them (ibid.: 123-124).


       Vistonitis, alongside the faith in democracy, stresses the Greek
national resistance against all forms of tyranny. This is a rather
stereotypical approach, a part of the national self-image, from the
glorious victories of the ancients against the “barbarians” up to
modern times, namely the revolution against the Sultan’s armies in
1821 and the nation’s heroic resistance against fascism and the Nazi
occupation during World War II (Beller - Leerssen 2007: 169). This
same aspect, the national struggles for freedom, «that never concerned
exclusively Greece’s own rescue or liberty» (Kassolas 2006: 184), is also
overemphasized in the narrator’s questioning of Greekness in
Kassolas’ travelogue. In both travelogues, the national struggles for
freedom and democracy are viewed as the Greek idiosyncratic feature
par excellence, a unifying line of national identity from antiquity until
modern times. Indeed, to the question of what can be perceived as the
modern enemy of Hellenism, Kassolas’ narrator opts for an answer
involving the loss of this spirit of independence («The enemy comes
from the fact that Greeks do whatever the foreigners tell them to do»,
ibid.: 194).



    2.2. Beyond the East-West duality: exploring a transnational Greek
     citizenship through the prisms of diaspora and cosmopolitanism

     A review of the historical context reveals indicative
correspondences between geopolitical challenges and the peculiarities
of national images of self and Other at a given moment. In the Greek
travelogues examined, one may notice a displacement at the end of the


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20th century beyond the traditional East vs. West duality –as the
differences between them are fading out through globalization and the
expansion of capitalism. In the second half of the 20th century, China
has stood at the center of speculations about the possibility of a new
world order. China is explored in Vistonitis’s travelogue as an
alternative to Western/American capitalism and to models of existing
communism. Nevertheless, China despite its rapid economic growth
seems to promise only to alter the positions of the players within the
existing world system, providing «capitalism with Chinese
characteristics» as expressed in the title of the book by Chinese
economist Yasheng Huang (2008).
      Through globalization the world loses dominating centers and the
very idea of centrality and all its arbitrary hierarchies is rendered void.
This very development could also lead to a fading of the national self-
narration about the Greek “particularism”, the choice to be determined
as “the Other of Others”. This self-determination was the major
concern since the founding of the Modern Greek State (1830) in order
to consolidate its existence by promoting the authenticity, racial purity
and historical continuity of the Greek nation. In the examined
travelogues’ depictions of Modern Greek national identity, the need to
define Greek identity in terms of difference and exclusion seems no
longer prominent. These travellers’ accounts do not lead to a
postnational conception as an alternative to the nation-state. What is
expressed in the texts is a rather transnational understanding of
Greekness, based upon the common ground with the Others.
Transnationalism as a concept does not contain only the «movement of
people, but also notions of citizenship, technology, forms of
multinational governance, and the mechanisms of global markets»
(Quayson - Daswani 2013: 4). Besides the material geographies of
labour migration or the trading in goods and services, the transnational
cultures also include the symbolic and imaginary geographies through
which we attempt to configure our increasingly transnational world.
      Whether the transnational experience in these travelogues is
through migration and diaspora (USA), or through cosmopolitanism
(China), there is a desire of broadening national borders, namely the


                                                                                9
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



imaginary ones. The contemporary concept of “diaspora” is useful in
our analysis as it is an inherently interactive one since it «involves an
understanding of the shifting relations between homelands and host
nations from the perspective both of those who have moved, whether
voluntarily or not, and of the host societies in which they find
themselves» (Quayson - Daswani 2013: 3). The status of immigration
and the hybrid national identity of Greek-American diaspora call
openly for self-reflexive questions about Greek national identity in
Kassolas’s text. During the gatherings of the Greek American
community on the occasion of two public lectures where the issue of
homeland is raised by eminent members of the Greek diaspora, the
narrator engages in a provocative dialogue with the speakers and the
audience by asking disturbing questions such as «What is to be Greek,
nowadays?» and «who will teach again Hellenism to the Greeks?»
(Kassolas 2006: 185). After some quite disappointing answers and the
failure of self-definition by the members of the Greek American
community in the USA, who acknowledge that «It is very hard to be
Greek» (ibid.: 193, 195-6), the narrator arrives also at the end of the
dialogue to statements of aporia concerning his national identity. In
addition to the uncertainty regarding Greekness, disconcerting
realizations, beyond the traditional geography of the nation-state, are
made by the narrator, as for instance, concerning Astoria, a
neighborhood in New York with thousands Greek immigrants. Astoria
is counted by the narrator as one of the largest Greek cities among
Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki (ibid.: 196).
     In the “Epilogue” of his journey to America, written in 1988 and
2005, Kassolas treats questions of national identity in terms of
openness, incorporation and cosmopolitan citizenship based on
democratic values.5 First of all, he proposes a civil integration of the
“Other Greece” hidden in the Other America –namely the Greek
immigrants in America. This applies as well to the Greek immigrants

     5
        For the demand that all world citizens enjoy human rights and
political participation, see the concepts of “cosmopolitan democracy” and
“political-legal cosmopolitanism” (Taraborrelli 2015: 47-85).


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in Australia, Canada, Germany and anywhere in the world where
there are large and prosperous Greek communities (ibid.: 345-7). He
claims that this full incorporation of the Greek diaspora with a right to
vote would define Greek identity beyond the borders of the nation-
state and would eventually increase the prosperity of Greece. It is
interesting to note that this position transcends the modernist model of
nation-state which excludes the diasporic phenomenon (Prevelakis
2016: 192). Kassolas sees Greece diachronically not in terms of
“uniqueness” but in its “multiplicity”: «Because Greece is not one, it has
never been one, there are many Greeces which have started from the
metropolis» (2006: 33). What is brought to the fore then, is the
perennial ability of Greeks for “networking” beyond their national
territory. In the recent geopolitical studies there is an emphasis on the
importance of the “network” structure of Hellenism through the
extended Greek diaspora and the existence of other national areas
outside the Greek state (Prevelakis 2016: 207).
      For Kassolas, the Greek national identity has never been
“national” in the narrow sense of the term of the nation-state: due to
Greece’s geographical position as a bridge between East and West, its
civilization, its struggles for liberty and for a number of other reasons,
«the Greek conscience has always held and still holds universality»
(Kassolas: 183-4). In the part of his “Epilogue” written in 2005, Kassolas
proposes to open the Greek identity and civil rights as well to the
foreign immigrants living and working in Greece without having the
fear of losing the “purity” of the national identity. There must be no
fear of “being bastardized” as a nation because, as he claims, this
hybridity could be an advantage, given that «the bastard nations are
the ones which survive» (ibid.: 348). He even states that it was this way
that «we have survived inside and outside Greece, and not as a “pure”
Aryan race» (ibid.). This view, contrary to the idealized stereotypical
narration of national “purity” converges with the most recent Modern
Greek approaches acknowledging the cultural diversity of Hellenism,
the fact that Greece has been a crossroads traversed, inhabited and




                                                                               11
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



dominated by a succession of populations (cf. Tziovas 2001; Prevelakis
2016: 135-8)6.
     In order to achieve this transnationalism in Greekness, great
emphasis is placed on the cultivation of a humanist Modern Greek
education, as a means for the ultimate incorporation of the foreigners
living in Greece. Kassolas proposes: «Let’s make our Greek education
enlightened, human, and this will unite us and incorporate us and we
will not be anymore so few Greeks in the world» (2006: 348). This
conception of a transnational Greek identity broadens to the point to
include citizens of other nationalities who share the Greek ideals, both
in political and aesthetic terms both inside the territory of the Greek
nation–state and abroad7. At the same time, by this choice, Greeks, as
claimed by Kassolas, will also be better incorporated in the world scene
and not seem like a case apart. This perception of Greekness beyond
the shared ethnicity stems from Isocrates’s notion of the name “Greek”:
«the name Greek seems to be not that of a people but of a “way of
thinking”; and people are called Greeks because they share in our
education rather than in our birth» (Panegyricus, 50). As Maria
Koundoura argues, Greece «cannot help but see itself as a “state of
mind” more than a nation-state». Accordingly, the timeless “Hellenic”
is seen as the “transnational style” to which the “national” tends to
conform in order to acquire an idiosyncratic identity (Koundoura 2009:
12).
     By questioning the long-established definitions of Greekness
which, from the Greek Independence War (1821) up to the integration
in the European Union (1981) were rather characterized by a gradual
closure of horizons (see, Prevelakis 2016: 51), the transnational


     6
        See Bhabha (1994: 5), who argues that “the very concepts of
homogenous national cultures” or “organic ethnic communities” are in a
profound process of redefinition.
     7   See also Appiah (2002:22) for the conception of a “cosmopolitan
patriotism”, as a situated form of cosmopolitanism capable of reconciling
universalism and particularism.



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                                       Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



conception of Modern Greek identity is explored through these
travelogues as a broadening of Greekness beyond the national borders
and as a form of embracing more hybrid, composite identities.



          2.3 The geopolitics of the translocated Greekness:
    a narrative of connectivity with the Others and promulgation
             of democratic values in the globalized world

      If we accept that national stereotypes do not aim at objectively
describing a prior reality –in fact, national images actively construct
that “reality”- they should be viewed as aiming to influence their
recipients. They must thus be examined in terms of their potential
functions in specific historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts (see
Neumann 2009: 287). Globalization has formed new conditions,
demanding a re-evaluation of national identities bound to the modern
nation-states. The present case-study, by investigating and organizing
alternative national images through these travelogues, attempts to
approach Modern Greek identity as an open question. This approach
incites novel thinking concerning the issue of the potential role of
Greece at the beginning of the 21st century.
      An overt ethical and political stance is expressed in these
travelogues against contemporary economic and political oppression
both in East and West. The absence of colonialist politics in Modern
Greek history is a considerable asset as it could facilitate the
relationship of Greece with non-Western people. This could even
qualify the country for a role of mediator between the Westerners and
the rest of the world (see Prevelakis, 2016: 202). In Vistonitis’ Bejing:
The Rose and the Lotus, the Chinese host, during the discussion with the
Greek narrator about the problems and paradoxes in the relationship
between Greece and Europe, poses questions inciting to reflection
concerning the affinities of Greece with the West and the East
respectively. The Chinese interlocutor challenges the stereotypical
familiarity of Greece with the West and even stimulates the Greeks to




                                                                              13
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



take an active role in their relationship with West by reconfiguring
“which Europe” they want:

           Can you tell me how do you explain that the West claims
     that it is built on the foundation of Greek culture? Do you feel as a
     Westerner? [….] “Maybe you, Greeks, have to decide which
     Europe you want”. And then: “It’s nice you have come here, even
     for a while. By observing other nations, we better understand
     ours. And then, who knows? We may have more in common than
     you think” he concluded. (Ibid.:125)


      In Vistonitis’ travelogue, after the discussion about the totalitarian
eastern regimes, the “host gaze” is incorporated in the content and
even in the form of the narrator’s harsh political criticism of the West,
which seemingly failed as well to fulfill the promise of a true
democracy. At the end of this travelogue, the narrator appears to adopt
the Chinese philosophical trope of short aphorisms in order to criticize
the pitfalls of Western civilization more accurately: he deplores the
western myth of the “infallible progress”, of «technology that would
have opened the field of the future and unified the civilization».
Instead, technology rather contributed to «a repression of any attempt
of individual revolution». As he concludes, «nobody has imagined that
the societies at the end of the century would continue to be equally
oppressive and in addition would have become executive» (ibid.: 220-
1). The traditional western criticism towards his country’s slow paced
modernization, which is supposed to undermine the full assumption of
its collective European identity, is also revised through his oriental
travelling experience. The technological “belatedness” of Greece is no
more to blame since it can be rather seen as a means of escaping
totalitarian control (ibid.: 229) and can be integrated in the nation’s
narrative of “resistance” against subjugation.
      Kassolas’ The Other America, recounts in dialogical form mainly
stories about the unsuccessful integration and the failure to belong of
the Greek American immigrants. One reason for this is the
disillusionment caused by the harsh American reality of poverty and


14
                                           Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



oppressive capitalism. The American democracy did not turn out to be
the land of promise. The other is the perpetual longing of the Greek
immigrants for their homeland, imagined as a paradise lost. According
to Avtar Brah, diaspora’s “homing desire” is not necessarily the same
as wanting to return to a physical place, the “desire for homeland”
(1996: 180). The feeling of diasporic nostalgia may then be seen as also
future-oriented and utopian, even though it is traditionally tied to a
sense of things past. In both travelogues, a longing for the human-
centered values of the ancient Greek civilization, is shared by the
narrators, alongside with a yearning for a future utopia of true
democracy at a world-level.8 Such narratives, by discussing Greekness
in the current global status quo through a diasporic nostalgia model,
are oriented both towards the past (longing for the ancient Greek
values) and towards the future (e.g. considering a role of the country as
a transnational mediator between East and West through the defense
and promotion of democratic values in the globalised world).
     By claiming the role of «Greece as a part of the world and not as
an isolated province or a photographic reproduction of the others»
(Vistonitis 2005: 220), the narrator in Vistonitis’ travelogue aspires to
see his country as a fully participating partner in the global scene.
Greece is not conceived as “different” or “Other to all others”, nor as
assimilated and hence “familiar”. Through the prisms of diasporic
nostalgia and cosmopolitan citizenship, alternative narratives of
Modern Greekness could be traced in both texts. They embrace a
transnational broadening of the national identity at the end of the 20th
century by featuring “openness”, “translocated citizenship” and
“connectivity” with western and eastern people sharing the same
democratic ideals against oppressive political and economic forms
(namely forms of globalization).
     The travelogues are written respectively in the decades preceding
and following Greece’s joining of the European Union in 1981, a major


     8
      For the conception of “true democracy” as a movement of
democratization, an ideal that no state incarnates, see Critchley 2007: 114-23.



                                                                                  15
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma



event which consolidated the Western, and more specifically
European, identity of Greece and provided new grounds for heated
debates about Modern Greek identity (see Zacharia 2008: 279). The
country’s entry in the Eurozone (2001) was a further consolidation of
its “Europeanness”, the acknowledgment of a strong collective
European identity. A few years later, this process has been harshly
challenged by a series of social issues due to the current Greek
economic crisis combined with an increasing influx of illegal
immigrants into the country. These facts could probably cause a
folding back to more traditional national conceptions about Modern
Greekness as “authentic” and “restrained” to the boundaries of the
nation-state. On the other hand, perhaps they could also empower the
narratives about a transnational resistance to economic globalization
through the return to human-centered Greek values (see Kassolas’
“Epilogue” to his travelogue written in 2005). Only the methodical
study of the national images produced in the diverse forms of the
contemporary Greek fictional and non-fictional discourses could really
test out these speculations.



                                 Conclusions
      As the debates about the meaning and substance of national
identity and belonging continue to be of major importance, it seems
relevant to explore processes of revitalizing our self-conceptions in a
restlessly changing world where various forms of the local and the
global interact. This article has attempted to study the eventual
contribution of contemporary travelogues in the renewing of national
imagery. Through the example of Greek travelogues examined here, it
is argued that contemporary travel writing by cultivating a dialogical
stance which takes into account the Other’s gaze, by embracing
positions of uncertainty and by engaging with critical political and
geopolitical issues could activate the potential to re-imagine the
traveller’s homeland and the world in ways that do not simply
reiterate the status quo. The alternative versions concerning Greekness


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in the travelogues examined through the prisms of diaspora and
cosmopolitanism have challenged the stereotyped national narrations
in more or less audacious ways. The development of new possibilities
and the search for new roles for the country in the globalised world
scene at the end of the 20th and in the beginning of the 21st century
demand the exploration of new Modern Greek self-images, less clear-
cut, more favorable to the circulation of information, goods and people
and thus more open to the Others and to the organization in diverse
scales beyond the nation-state.




                                                                             17
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma




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                              The author
      Peggy Karpouzou

Peggy Karpouzou received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Literary Theory
from Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is Assistant Professor in Literary
Theory at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens (Greece). Her research interests focus on Literary
Theory and Cultural Criticism (postmodernism, identity politics, travel
literature, posthumanism, relationship between science and literature).
She is the author of articles in Greek, French and Anglophone journals
and edited volumes. Her books include La Poétique de l’ironie dans la
nouvelle du XIXe siècle, 2003, A. Tzouma, P. Karavia and P. Karpouzou,
Bibliography of Literary Theory and Cultural Criticism 1957-2007 (in Greek,
forthcoming in 2017) and the translation in Greek of Terry Eagleton’s
After Theory (2008). She has also participated in research programs of
the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS-France), Gallica
(BNF-National Library of France) and the University of Athens.

    Email: pkarpouzou@phil.uoa.gr




                              The paper
Date sent: 31/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017




                                                                               21
Peggy Karpouzou, Beyond the East-West Dilemma




                        How to quote this paper
Karpouzou, Peggy, “Beyond the East-West dilemma: Rethinking
Greekness through diffracted gazes in contemporary Greek
travelogues”, Longing and Belonging/ Désir et Appartenance, Eds.
Massimo Fusillo, Brigitte Le Juez, Beatrice Seligardi, Between, VII.13
(2017), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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