Email this article The archaeology of exclusion: repatriation, whiteness, and a lost daughter named Carrie
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss the notion of “repatriation” of antiquities that have been illicitly excavated and exported, against the backdrop of Greece’s attempts to achieve their return. Taking the British Museum Caryatid as my primary case study, I survey recent Greek theatre plays and children’s storybooks in order to examine how the stolen statue is invariably portrayed as the nation’s missing “daughter” or “sister”, suffering in solitary exile and eagerly awaiting “her” return. Based on this discussion, I proceed to claim that the repatriation narrative serves as a means to reconfirm Greece’s whiteness, and the Greek nation’s rightful place as part of the West. Employing the methodological tools of coloniality and crypto-coloniality, as well as the parallel modern example of Egypt, I argue that it is through such attempts at partial representation that political communities in the periphery of the West imagine themselves into being.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Adi, H. 2018. Pan-Africanism: A History. London: Bloomsbury.
BBC 2023. “Egypt bans Dutch archaeologists over exhibition linking Beyonce and Rihanna to Queen Nefertiti.” BBC News (9 June). Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65835611 [11 June 2023]
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge.
Birbili, E. 2013. The Sad Caryatid. Athens: Hedylos.
Buell, F. 1994. National Culture and the New Global System.
Baltimore, MD & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Christopoulou, A. 2020. Why don’t the Caryatids Laugh Anymore? Athens: Papyros.
Clogg, R. 2013. A Concise History of Greece. 3d Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Damaskos, D. 2008. “The uses of Antiquity in photographs by Nelly: imported modernism and home-grown ancestor worship in inter-war Greece.” In Damaskos, D. and Plantzos, D. (eds), A Singular Antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece. Athens: Benaki, 321-336.
Danopoulos, C.P. and Karpathakis, A. 2005: “Racial and ethnic attitudes and individual relatedness among Greek-Americans.” New Balkan Politics 9. Available at https://www.newbalkanpolitics.org.mk/cat/issue-9-2005/141 [10 February 2022]
Dollis, N. 2015. Nights without Carrie. A Story about the Sixth Caryatid. Athens: Kaleidoscope.
El Naggar, M. 2021. “22 mummies are moved in a glittering display in Cairo.” The New York Times (3 April). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/world/middleeast/cairo-mummies-parade.html [10 February 2022]
Elculture 2012. “I ekti Karyatida”. ElCulture (29 February). Available at https://elculture.gr/c/theatro-xoros/kathgories-theatrou-xorou/neoellhniko-ergo/ [26 June 2023]
Garner, S. 2007. Whiteness. An Introduction. London & New York: Routledge.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Georgakas, D. 1987. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 14:5-53.
Giannakopoulou, L. 2007. The Power of Pygmalion. Ancient Greek Sculpture in Modern Greek Poetry, 1860-1960. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gotsi, G. 2015. “‘The lament of the Caryatids’: the biography of a tradition (1803–1902).” Modern Greek Studies Online 1:55–104.
Gourgouris, St. 1996. Dream Nation. Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hamilakis, Y. 2007. The Nation and its Ruins. Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamilakis, Y. 2009. “Indigenous Hellenisms / Indigenous Modernities: classical antiquity, materiality, and Modern Greek society.” In Boys-Stones, G., Graziosi, B. and Vasunia, Ph. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19-31.
Hamilakis, Y. 2016: “Some debts can never be repaid: the archaeo-politics of the crisis.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34:227–64.
Hardwick, L. 2010: Postcolonial Studies. In Kallendorf, C.W. (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 312-327.
Hatdjoudi-Tounta, E. 2012. Adventures of the Acropolis Marbled Girls. Athens: Agyra.
Herzfeld, M. 1986. Ours once more. Folklore, ideology, and the making of Modern Greece. New York: Pella.
Herzfeld, M. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass. Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herzfeld, M. 2002. The absent presence: discourses of crypto-colonialism. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4, 899-926.
Hicks, D. 2020. The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press.
Hill, M. (ed.) 1997. Whiteness. A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press.
Hussein, W. 2021. “Egypt mummies pass through Cairo in ancient rulers' parade.” BBC News (3 April). Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56508475?fbclid=IwAR1jSW9E8LgQ7su7vUzkTK2J3A5iK6nghStJOBDJ-0RwZrcmzu3gwkex9Us [10 February 2022]
Jameson, F. 2003. Postmodernism. Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 10th Ed. Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press.
Jusdanis, G. 1991. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture. Inventing National Literature. Baltimore, MD & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Knappett, C. 2007. “Materials with materiality?” Archaeological Dialogues 14:20-23.
Kotseli, A. 2012. “ ‘I am Greek and I Want to Go Home’ movement for the repatriation of looted Greek antiquities.” Greek Reporter (5 August). Available at https://greekreporter.com/2012/08/05/i-am-greek-and-i-want-to-go-home-movement-for-the-repatriation-of-looted-greek-antiquities/ [26 June 2023].
Lemke, Th. 2012. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. London & New York: Routledge.
Leonardo, L. 2002. “The souls of white folk: critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse.” Race Ethnicity and Education 5:29–50.
MacGaffey, W. 2000. Kongo Political Culture. The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular. Bloomington, IND: Indiana University Press.
Menos, M. 2003. Discussions with a Caryatis. Athens: Livanis.
Meskell, L. (ed.) 2005. Archaeologies of Materiality. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Middleton, S., Roediger, D.R., and Shaffer, D.M. (eds) 2016. The Construction of Whiteness. An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of a White Identity. Jackson. LA: University Press of Mississippi.
Miller, D. 2005. Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Nilsson, J. and Wallenstein, S.-O. (eds) 2013. Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality. Stockholm: Sodertorn University.
Ocampo, E. 2016. “Contemporary Artists on Colonial Museums.” Boletín de Arte 37:35-47.
Plantzos, D. 2017. “Caryatids lost and regained: rebranding the classical body in contemporary Greece.” Journal of Greek Media & Culture 3:3-29.
Plantzos, D. 2023. “Archaeopolitics: The second lives of statues.” CAS Sofia Working Paper Series 14:72-102.
Sennett, R. 1993. Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Sidiropoulos-Romanofski, V. 2021. The Caryatid’s Tear. Athens: Aggelaki.
Souliotis, Y. 2011. Our Sister Lives in London. Athens: Sokoli-Kouledaki.
Svenbro, J. 1993. Phrasikleia. An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
To Vima. 2012. “I ekti Karyatida” (5 October). Available at https://www.tovima.gr/files/1/2012/05/10/6hKARYATIDA.pdf [1 March 2015].
Tziovas, D. 2001. Beyond the Acropolis: rethinking Neohellenism. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19:189-220.
Tziovas, D. 2014. Decolonizing Antiquity, heritage politics, and performing the past. In Tziovas, D. (ed.), Re-imagining the Past. Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-26.
Whitaker, Ch. 2002: Was Cleopatra Black? Ebony (February). Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20040811082755/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_4_57/ai_82479151/ [11 June 2023]
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26247/aura6.4
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
ISSN: 2623-3428 (digital), 2623-3436 (print)
© 2018-2020 National and Kapodistrian University of Athen, Department of History and Archaeology.
