Description
Book SynopsisNicolas Argenti considers the citizens of the Greek island of Chios and how they reshape memories of a traumatic past to form new ways of coping with moments of contemporary national crisis.
Trade Review"A beautifully written ethnography of remembrance of exodus and the tragedies that caused it, this book is an essential reading to scholars of the role of collective memory in trauma, international migration, diaspora, and exile. Argenti conjugates the political with the emotional, the personal with the collective in a groundbreaking ethnography of memory as strategy of resistance to oppression and to the challenges of time in the formation of social identity. "—Joëlle Bahloul, author of The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962
"Like cubist painting, Argenti's multidimensional book offers multiple perspectives on a seminal event that continues to explode in differing modalities of history. Telling the story of one of the first humanitarian crises in Europe, it traces the means by which the memories and historicities of the disparate groups associated with an event come to be embedded in the experience of time itself."—Antonis Liakos, author of Pos to parelthon ginetai istoria? [How does the past turn into history?]
Table of ContentsPreface
Note on Transliteration
Remembering Absence
1. The Light of Certain Stars: From Memory to Historical Simultaneity
2. Full Fathom Five: On the Temporal Dimensions of Exodus
3. Crisis and Famine: Sovereign Debt, Political Violence, and Oneiric Revelation
4. The Love of Flowers: Catastrophe in the Aegean
5. Emptiness of Anavatos: Exile, Commemoration, and Melancholia
6. Ruins of Kidianta: Dwelling, Oblivion, and Resurrection
7. The Abbess of Nea Moni: The Contemporaneity of Divine Vision.
8. Life in the Tomb: Rocket Warriors of Vrontados
9. The Darksome Line: Aegean Temporality
Reference List
Index
