Anna Carastathis

"Our grandparents, refugees; Our parents, immigrants; We, racists?" The slogan that prefaces the paper provides the theoretical caveat for the tensions, limitations, and contradictions of academic discourses in conjuring the daily realities of the era of the 'refugee crisis' in Greece. This paper has the form of a dialogue between a visual sociologist (Myrto) and a political theorist (Anna) who investigate different forms of the ways the 'refugee crisis' is changing the socio-political landscapes in Greece. The multiple aspects of our identities provide valuable tools with which we unpack the multiple and contradictory narratives of researching, learning, and disseminating in the current milieu. In particular, we are interested in the ways we shape knowledge and the tension between the episte-mological and the ontological ways of knowing. In other words, by moving from theory to praxis and back, we are attempting to reconcile the problem of knowing and the problem of being part of a specific crisis milieu. For example, how can we use crisis as a research methodology? What can we learn from the ongoing 'refugee crisis' in relation to issues of citizenship, belonging, and the future of the European project? Furthermore, the paper attempts to transcend discursive borders between social sciences and the humanities by analysing the deeply performative, situated and embodied practices of doing research in moments of crisis. For example, how to navigate multiple, and at times contradictory, aspects of one's identity without returning to outmoded discourses of positivism and objectivity?

My point of departure is Said’s rejection of the idea of an “Orientalist” Hellenism. What might it mean to argue that Orientalism characterizes “intra-European” cultural politics, specifically the colonial geography of western Europe vis-à-vis its “subaltern” Others? Contra Said, I argue that the function of Hellenism in constituting both the fantasy of Europe and western hegemony has an Orientalist structure. I explore the cultural underpinnings of Greece’s relation to “Europe” in Hellenistic discourses. Then, I suggest that the dominant discourse surrounding the odious Greek debt has an Orientalist structure. Pairing a critique of Orientalism with a core-periphery analysis arguably enables a more nuanced understanding of the coloniality of power in today’s “age of austerity,” enabling a deconstruction of the racial logic underlying continental integration and revealing the violence inherent in the fantasy of European civilization.

Penelope Deutscher’s book, "Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason" engages with the recent interest in reproduction, futurity, failure, and negativity in queer theory, but also the historical and ongoing investments in the concept of reproduction in feminist theory as well as (US) social movements. "Foucault’s Futures" troubles the forms of subjectivation presupposed by “reproductive rights” from a feminist perspective, exploring the “contiguity” between reproductive reason and biopolitics—specifically the proximity of reproduction to death, risk, fatality, and threat: its thanatopolitical underbelly.

All migration politics are reproductive politics. The nation-state project of controlling migration secures the racialised demographics of the nation, understood as a reproducible fact of the social and human body, determining who is differentially included, who is excluded, and who is exalted. In this commentary, we put forward a provocation about methodological heteronormativity and its omnipresence in the discourse surrounding the so-called “refugee crisis.” By methodological heteronormativity, we refer to the ways states, supranational organisations, hegemonic ideologies, but also solidarity movements and critical scholars construct the figure of the (un)deserving “refugee.”

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy.

Different evocations of “crisis” create distinct categories that in turn evoke certain social reactions. Post-2008, Greece became the epicentre of the “financial crisis”; simultaneously, since 2015 with the advent of the “refugee crisis,” it became the “hotspot of Europe.” What are the different vocabularies of crisis? Moreover, how have both representations of crisis facilitated humanitarian crises to become phenomena for European and transnational institutional management? What are the hegemonically constructed subjects of the different crises? The everyday reality in the crisis-ridden hotspot of Europe is invisible in these representations. It is precisely the daily, soft, lived, and unspoken realities of intersecting crises that hegemonic discourses of successive, overlapping, or “nesting crises” render invisible. By shifting the focus from who belongs to which state-devised category to an open-ended, polyvocal account of capitalist oppressions, we aim to question the state’s and supranational efforts to divide the “migrant mob” into discrete juridical categories of citizens (emigrants), refugees, and illegal immigrants, thereby undermining coalitional struggles between precaritised groups.