Abstracts
Riki Van Boeschoten
(University of Thessaly)
Nation, memory and the politics of suffering in a transnational space: chosen traumas of the Greek Civil War
The paper will explore some of the ways in which the creation of a global transnational public space has affected the use of history in the construction of master narratives on the nation. It will present an ethnography of public debates involving two transnational organizations for which the evacuation of children to Eastern Europe during the Greek Civil War has become part of a “constitutive” narrative on the nation. These two organizations, one belonging to the Macedonian diaspora and the other to the Greek diaspora, have confronted each other openly since the early 1990’s in the global arena around issues related to the so-called “Macedonian Question”. The heavily loaded political controversies surrounding this episode of the Greek Civil War concerns both organizations since the children which left Greece in 1948 were partly Greek- and partly Macedonian-speaking. Today both national communities claim their “own” children as exclusive victims and use the notion of victimhood to construct a moral community of a “suffering” nation. While part of this rhetoric replicates old discourses developed in the late 1940s, it also integrates new topics which have come to dominate transnational media over the last decades, such as the discourse on human rights and the notion of “genocide”. Comparing the discourse of two rival organizations, belonging to a different nation, but sharing part of their history, may contribute to a better understanding of the continued persistence of nationalist discourse in a global transnational world.
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