Imperialism, Revisionism, Counter-hegemony, and the Greek 1940s as Event

Abstract

Abstract: This study focuses on contemporary cultural projects dealing with the Greek revolutionary event of the 1940s. Empirically, the study examines a growing corpus of different cultural practices dealing with aspects of the Greek 1940s. These cultural practices are viewed as counter-archives and conceptualized using the notion of the proletarian public sphere associated with counter-hegemonic legacies, discourses, narratives, and practices situated in today's Greek political antagonisms. The past is understood to haunt the present in instances when the constitutive violence of hegemonic discourses and institutions unfolds. The projects studied create public presences of subjects and circumstances repressed by the official Greek public sphere. This signifies a production of knowledge from below, beyond what official knowledge regimes foreground and exclude. The projects unfold utopian margins, pointing towards the existence of a living social memory of emancipatory and revolutionary struggles that remain incomplete.