JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics by Dimitris Papanikolaou
• Lydia Papadimitriou (bio)

Toward the end of his introduction, Dimitris Papanikolaou writes that "this is a very personal, very idiosyncratic, very weird history of the Weird Wave" (24). The book is indeed personal: the author explicitly places (his own) affect center stage, writes about how the films "touch" him, and positions "biopolitical realism"—the key concept that structures the book—as a "survival tactic" (23). The book is idiosyncratic for the very same reasons, as well as for the ways in which its author inflects, adjusts, and expands otherwise familiar concepts such as allegory in new directions—most crucially, here, by introducing the notion of metonymic allegory. And it is weird insofar as it combines a certain degree of playfulness (evident at a glance in some of its subheadings) with intense theoretical engagement while also implicitly acknowledging—just as the Greek Weird Wave filmmakers have done through their films—the "unease" of articulating fixed and authoritative interpretations, opting instead to "reclaim … weirdness … as an analytical position" (11).

None of the above qualities makes the book problematic; if anything, they signal its methodological and heuristic strengths. Far from being a formalist genre study, Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics seeks to find connections among form, content, context, and affect within the otherwise rather disparate group of Greek films that emerged in the late 2000s and thrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This was a period overdetermined by the Greek financial crisis, which affected not only the conditions of the films' production (if not initially, then certainly by the time the term "Greek Weird Wave" was coined by British journalist Steve Rose in 2011) but also the interpretative frames projected onto them—frames that encouraged traditional (i.e., metaphor-based) allegorical readings of the nation in crisis.

Triggered by his own emotive and bodily response to the films, Papanikolaou offers an analysis that goes beyond such approaches. He argues that the films' potency lies in their ability to convey "weirdness" as a "structure of feeling" (12) for the conditions of life in the early twenty-first century as experienced—not only, but with particular intensity—in Greece. Borrowing Foucault's notion of biopolitics, understood as the "social and political practices that focus on 'disciplining the living being'" and ultimately subjugating "'corporeal life into systems of

• Rethinking Greek Genius:Reflections on Demon Entrepreneurs¹
• Thomas W. Gallant (bio)

This fascinating collection of essays examines "Greek genius" from various angles and interpretive stances. The concept is rooted in two stereotypes: the resourceful and clever Odysseus from Homer's epics and the deceitful Sinon from Virgil's works. Collectively, the essays argue that the Greek genius is closely tied to economic success, with shipping and commerce playing a crucial role in spreading Enlightenment ideas and fostering political emancipation in Greek lands. The argument suggests a reciprocal relationship between economic success and education, with each reinforcing the other. The volume also emphasizes the persistence of the Greek genius stereotype as a myth of redemption despite Greece's limited resources and uncertain prospects. Nations have traditionally crafted self-images of their character that define them and distinguish them from others. British reserve and stalwartness, for example, are captured in the phrase "stiff upper lip." Americans have crafted a self-conception around concepts such as "rugged individualism" and "the self-made man." For Greeks, the equivalent is the idea of the Greek genius, and this richly textured collection explores the content and impact of the concept on the political, social, and economic levels. It contributes to the broader discussion surrounding the history of Greek identity, particularly its complex interplay with cultural stereotypes, economic factors, and education.

In addition to discussing the structure and content of the volume, Gounaris, in his introduction, grapples with the thorny issue of what constitutes the "Greek genius" and how the phrase's meaning has changed over the ages. Translating Ἑλληνικὸν δαιμόνιον from ancient Greek to modern English is a challenging task because it was polyvalent and context-dependent. Gounaris argues that, in ancient Greek, both daimon and daimonion signify "god" or "deity." In modern Greek, they are likewise synonymous and encompass religious and [End Page 95] divine connotations as well as exceptional ingenuity in the broader sense of logical and emotional intelligence. Despite the nineteenth-century business opportunities available to diaspora Greeks, the acquired feature of ingenuity in the Greek temperament has been largely overlooked. The Greek character, with its various talents such as shrewdness and cunning, has been well studied, but there has been a tendency to neglect the (re)fashioning of the Greek genius as a constructed trait rather than an inherent one.

Part 1 of the book, "Beware of the Greeks: From Antiquity to Rediscovery," contains chapters by Evangelos Sakkas, Constantine Theodoridis, Ioannis

Reviewed by:

• Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 ed. by April Kalogeropoulos Householder
• Michalis Sotiropoulos (bio)

As expected, the bicentenary of the start of the Greek Revolution of 1821 was an incentive for scholars to revisit the topic. The book under review is one of the many new studies that were published as a result—for example, the recent volumes edited by Kitromilides (2021), by Kitromilides and Tsoukalas (2021), and by Cartledge and Varnava (2022). What makes the volume under review stand out are, first, the interdisciplinary perspective it adopts in approaching its subject matter, and, second, the subject matter itself—the book's concentration on none other than Laskarina Bouboulina, one of the "heroines" of the Revolution. Among many recent books (including monographs) touching on key protagonists of the Revolution, this is, to my knowledge, the only one that focuses on a woman and that therefore gives due weight to gender as a category of analysis—this in itself is a very important addition to the literature on 1821. The volume is also interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together historians, [End Page 121] art historians, scholars of film and literary studies, and ethnomusicologists, as well as archivists and other professionals. Indeed, the volume focuses less on Bouboulina herself than on the heroine's afterlives; on the ways in which she has been commemorated or forgotten; on how she has been depicted in art, film, songs, and poems both in Greece and elsewhere; and on how these depictions have been used and received by philhellenic movements around the world.

These themes are brought together by the editor, April Kalogeropoulos Householder, in the introduction to the volume and in a following chapter on the available primary and secondary sources on Bouboulina. These two introductory essays contain important theoretical and historiographical insights, especially on the main tropes that have characterized Bouboulina's depictions, on the significance of adopting an interdisciplinary perspective in order to make sense of these depictions, and on the reasons why Bouboulina has been marginalized in the historiography of the Greek Revolution. But these two essays also contain, here and there, claims that some may disagree with, one key example being some formulaic arguments about the backwardness of Greek society under the Ottomans and the role of women in this society—a line of argument that goes back to the 1960s–1970s and to studies of