The kouros of Keratea: Constructing subaltern pasts in contemporary Greece

Abstract

Classical antiquity has been deployed in contemporary Greece as an agent of nationalidentity forging, and images of archaeological artifacts often feature in the public discourse, used to support state ideologies and promote national culture at home and abroad. This article, however, deals with a number of recently circulated images, designed in the margins of modern society in order to convey a defiantly anti-state message. Such images are manipulated according to the strategies devised and repeatedly applied by nationalist rhetoric in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, though their outcome is markedly different: rather than promoting historical continuity and social cohesion they create a disturbing sense of rupture. These irreverent images are projected as 'minority reports' against hitherto established ideologies, challenging their hegemony by adopting their own technologies of normalization and assimilationism. As weapons against the supremacy of the state, these performative declarations of a peculiar anti-state nationalism seem to threaten the integrity of the nation state considerably more than other, external forces are feared to do. © The Author(s) 2012.