Description
The countryside is increasingly projected in the Greek public sphere as a place to seek refuge from economic hardship and gloomy future prospects. In 2012 the government ran a campaign to encourage youth to return to the countryside “because people wish better human relations in smaller communities; they return to the roots” as the then Minister of Agriculture put it exemplifying politicians’ use of nostalgia as a powerful rhetorical tool. Simultaneously with this political strategy to solve the crisis, new discourses about the countryside have developed in the cultural sphere. As in earlier idolizations of the Greek countryside, nostalgia is a central feature and my paper presents a comparative analysis of two types of cultural products dealing with the countryside with regard to the function of nostalgic representations. It is well known that nostalgia thrives in times of crisis and often it is perceived as regressive daydreaming to soothe the pain of an irretrievable loss. Boym (2002) gives a more nuanced interpretation of the concept by distinguishing between restorative and reflective nostalgia where the latter refers to nostalgia’s potential to disclose present injustice and inspire visions of a different future. The analysis is informed by Boym’s dual model while also referring to other approaches that consider the concept in relation to ethics, authenticity and nature (Su 2005, Santesso 2006, Ladino 2012). The analyzed material are two TV documentary series (Αυτοί που πήραν τα βουνά, ET1 2011 and Επιστρέφωντας στο χωριό, Alpha 2014); and two short novels by Yannis Makridakis (2012, 2013). Playing heavily on nostalgic images of traditional village life, the documentaries present a series of narratives about urban dwellers changing lives and values by settling in the countryside. Village life is also at the core of the novels but with a development criticism situated between art and activism promoting a vision of life in harmony with the soil based on age-old traditions. The paper examines the ways these two types of cultural production challenge the dominant rhetoric about economic growth as the crisis solution and how nostalgia is used in their projections of the countryside as an alternative (eu)topos.| Period | 17 Oct 2015 |
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| Event title | MGSA Symposium 2015: The 24th biennial Symposium of the Modern Greek Studies Association. |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Atlanta, Georgia, United StatesShow on map |