The Nation Has Two Voices: Diforia and Performativity in Athens 2004

This article explores the contemporary conditions of national self-presentation, inviting students of national identity to reconsider the nature of national self-narration through new conceptual tools. It is argued that contemporary nations have two `voices': one is addressed to their members, another speaks to the nation's external interlocutors. Both voices contribute to the performance of identity: for nations which are the product of colonial and `crypto-colonial' encounters, narration is characterized by a negotiation of the boundaries between private and public voices and slippage in utterance. The article introduces a new concept in the study of culture, `diforia', which accounts for both this split meaning of utterance and national performativity in public. The concept is mobilized to examine and deconstruct a recent case of Greek diforia enacted in the context of the opening and closing ceremonies of Athens 2004

Domesticating the Tourist Gaze in Thessaloniki's Prigipos

The article examines how Prigipos, a cafe´ in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki,communicates Greek cosmological themes through the way it ‘stages’ urban memories.The staging suggests an ‘Oriental’ tourist-like flaˆnerie that matches, and is directed towards the cafe´’s physical and symbolic surroundings (notably, the TurkishConsulate, the adjacent paternal house of Turkey’s first President, Kemal Ataturk, butalso the old part of the city, historically populated by Greek refugees from AnatolianTurkey). My ethnographic eye is examined as constitutive of this flanerie, especially sinceI grew up in Thessaloniki. Through the employment of mixed research tools andmethods, I explore how Prigipos’s spectacular self-presentation replaced old migrantkafeneion culture with new aesthetic fusions to enable its global consumerist mobility. Atthe same time, the article argues that old ethno-national formulas are enmeshed inPrigipos’s design and narratives, endorsing a Thessalonikiote permutation of culture

Byzantium Evolutionized: Architectural History and National Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Serbia

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, European nations have been perennially historicized through a variety of disciplinary regimes — from political and cultural history, to archeology and architectural history. Regardless of the complexity and diversity of changeable political systems and phases of development of particular European nationalisms, national historiographies have had a major role in distinguishing particular national identities according to their distinct historical background and cultural traditions. This phenomenon was based on the controversial and often dubious process of selection and invention of a suitable ‘national’ past, which consequently provided a framework for historicization of different national groups — both synchronically and diachronically. As a result, architectural historiographies throughout Europe have produced a complex system of similarities and dissimilarities between different nations, reinforcing well-established and operational cultural, political, and religious dichotomies that entirely dominate the perception of European nations and national identities today