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This noteworthy edited book is a kaleidoscope of contributions by scholars, fiction writers, and film directors. The papers were originally presented in the summer of 2016 at the University of Copenhagen’s international workshop, “Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989.” Divided into two parts, the volume revisits and reframes modern Greek history through literature, film, theater, and popular culture in order to reflect on present day Greece. The thought-provoking content and the timing of the book’s release are significant: readers are presented with a multilayered exploration of the relation between culture and history, past and present, just ahead of the 2021 bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence and not long after the financial crisis of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015. Since the volume’s release, the notion of crisis has continued to reverberate and to express different kinds of challenges on the regional and global levels: these include populism, the pandemic, and rising intrastate and interstate tensions in the eastern Mediterranean. In the midst of this turbulent period, the book invites readers to explore contemporary Greek cultural production and its observant critique of the modern Greek experience. The contributors consider dis/continuities, omissions, silences, unearthed memories, legacies, and the marginalized, as well as old and new identities emerging from a nation that frames its modern existence and sense of belonging in multiple ways, resulting in hybrid characteristics. This project can be situated alongside recent publications that focus on different aspects of Greek history and culture—for example, the collections edited by Dimitris Tziovas (2017), by Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis (2004), and by Keith Brown and Yannis Hamilakis (2003).
Part 1 of this collection is organized under four themes: “Popularizing Neglected Pasts,” “Constructing Past, Present, and Future in Migrant Fiction,” “Trauma, Sentimentality, and Crisis in Literature,” and “Satire and Nostalgia in Popular Culture.” Important references are made to public history—defined as “the process in which historical knowledge is constructed (or challenged) through objects, artifacts, and memorials, but also through works of art, including fiction” (87)—as well as to cultural...