From politics to nostalgia – and back to politics: Tracing the shifts in the filmic depiction of the Greek 'long 1960s' over time

A number of Greek feature films in the 1990s and early 2000s – from End of an Era to Uranya – created a standard depiction of the Colonels’ dictatorship as an era filled with bittersweet adolescent memories. The Comedy of the Junta: The Light Side of a Dark Era, a recent documentary produced in April 2010 by Elias Kanellis, presented it as a laughable farce. More importantly, even, this period was treated as distant and definitely over. Almost from the onset of the economic crisis, we may say that there is a change of paradigm regarding the use of the junta and a radical departure from both the grotesque and the nostalgic view. Rather, its more brutal aspects began to be stressed in a thinly veiled attempt to highlight the continuities between past and present, the police violence and authoritarian practices of the 1967–74 era and that of the 2010–12 one – best encompassed in the popular slogan of the Indignados “The Junta did not end in ’73”. Typical examples are Fotos Lambrinos’ television documentary series It's just a junta, will it pass? and Alinda Dimitrious’s documentary The Girls of the Rain (2011). This article traces this shift and its poetics, focusing on various representative examples of both tendencies and the ways in which they sought to create a certain form of public memory

1968–2008: The Inheritance of Utopia

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Introduction: The end of a parable? Unsettling the transitology model in the age of crisis

This volume brings together scholars from the fields of history, political science, political economy, historical sociology and cultural studies, to comment on the theoretical and empirical unsettling of democratic transitions at the time of the economic crisis. The volume links together transitions in time and space, reappraising the democratic processes in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s, the post-1989 transformations in Eastern Europe, the effects of Southern Cone democratisations and the 2011 revolts in the Arab worlds, resisting both temporal particularities and national exceptionalisms. It further showcases how even supposed model transitions came under attack during the current economic crisis, thus highlighting the incloncusive nature of these events and the strong interconnections between past and present

1968–2008: The Inheritance of Utopia

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Review of Nikolaos Papadogiannis', Militant around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981

Nikolaos Papadogiannis. Militant around the Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981. New York: Berghahn, 2015. x + 329 pp

"Everything Links"? Temporality, Territoriality and Cultural Transfer in the '68 Protest Movements

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1968, 1989, 2011: reconsidering social movements, 'moments of change' and theoretical framing over time

This article focuses on three separate "moments of change" - 1968, 1989 and 2011 – in order to trace the changes in the way in which social movements were theoretically framed on a research level ever since the 1960s. Rather than focusing on the real or imaginary connections that activists often create with the contestatory past – or the rejection thereof – it demonstrates the ways in which those moments were theorised and the genealogies that were forged by specialists, who more often than not were implicated in the events themselves. In this respect, it argues that 1968 was the starting date that defined to a greater or lesser extent how we still view and experience collective mobilisations

1968, 1989, 2011: reconsidering social movements, 'moments of change' and theoretical framing over time

This article focuses on three separate "moments of change" - 1968, 1989 and 2011 – in order to trace the changes in the way in which social movements were theoretically framed on a research level ever since the 1960s. Rather than focusing on the real or imaginary connections that activists often create with the contestatory past – or the rejection thereof – it demonstrates the ways in which those moments were theorised and the genealogies that were forged by specialists, who more often than not were implicated in the events themselves. In this respect, it argues that 1968 was the starting date that defined to a greater or lesser extent how we still view and experience collective mobilisations