Putting the Black Back in the Mediterranean: The De/facement of Whiteness and European Innocence in Contemporary Greek Society

It is commonly assumed that Greece, like other countries in the Balkan region, is not a place where we need to discuss race, anti-blackness, white supremacy, or even European colonial histories. This talk, by contrast, draws on Penelope Papalias’s experience as a founding member of the initiative dëcoloиıze hellάş and training in historical anthropology at the University of Michigan to make a case for the hidden centrality of coloniality and white supremacy to myths of Greek nation and modernity. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, Professor Papailias uses a critical keyword of the decolonial movement, defacement, to make a case for the historic whitening (not inherent whiteness) of the Mediterranean given the connectedness of modern Greece to the project of European modernity.

Penelope Papailias is Αssociate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, where she directs the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities. Having grown up in New York City, the child of a Greek immigrant, and studied English literature at Harvard (B.A) and cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan (Ph.D.) before returning/migrating to her father’s homeland, she is especially critical of the role of knowledge production in national mythologies and narratives of settler colonial states. Her research centers on historical culture, the politics of memory and monuments; media events, affective networks and witnessing of violence/death of the Other in/as the public sphere; necropolitics, ecocide, decoloniality and black geographies in the Greek context; experimental pedagogies and public anthropology. Among her publications are Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (Palgrave Macmillian, 2005), Digital Ethnography (Kallipos, 2015, with P. Petridis), A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures & Ethnographic Aesthetics (ed., Rosa Luxemburg Greece, 2023) and Greek Colonialities (ed., Rosa Luxemburg Greece).