By: Yiorgos Anagnostou
The project of interconnecting Greek people worldwide is now in full swing. A staple in the politics of the Greek state, this desire for forming a global Hellenism proliferates today in the mission statements of many diaspora organizations. It is expressed, as we will see, in online media platforms, conferences, fundraising initiatives and philanthropic activities, galas, and the international dissemination of popular culture, among other venues.
This phenomenon rescales identity beyond conventional national (Greek) and diasporic (Greek Australian, Greek Canadian) domains to produce consciousness of belonging to and affinities with a yet inchoate global Greek cultural universe.
The remapping of Hellenism at a global scale raises questions about context, content, intent, and interests. In what specific social spaces is Hellenism produced as a global entity? Who produces it, and for what purpose? Is there a singular, overlapping vision across several constituencies, or are there competing renderings? In the latter case, what is at stake in each of its various enunciations?
It is important to situate this phenomenon in the broadest possible context. The intensifying articulations of Greek identity outside Greece are not the sole product of Greek institutional initiatives. Rather, they connect with worldwide political and economic developments operating beyond the Greek state and the diasporas. Since at least the 1990s, the enabling forces have involved international financial institutions and governmental policies in powerful multicultural countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and nations of the European Union—in the context of global capitalism.
Governments in the Global North embrace diasporas at their home territories as “best practice” to further national interests. Diasporas, particularly economically robust ones with high assimilation rates, are heralded as agents advancing mutual economic and geopolitical interests. They are valued for contributing to global investments and to transnational knowledge exchange across professional and scientific communities; they are also seen as mediators between their home and historical homeland in the interest of regional stabilities. In this context, diasporic identities proliferate.[1]
A space then is created which allows not merely the expression of ethnic identity—say Greek American or Greek Australian—within a polity but also, importantly, encourages the affirmation of (regulated) diasporic affiliations and affinities with a historical homeland. In other words, diaspora is legitimized by an array of home states as a category of identification and practice. This state-sanctioning of diasporas in the Global North evidently suits the project of enunciating a Greek identity globally by the Greek state, and diaspora elites and constituencies who seek to tap onto home, diasporic and homeland resources for their own purposes.
This state of affairs mediates the circulation of the global Greek imaginary across geopolitical spaces. Within this terrain we witness a multitude of mechanisms contributing to the making of in-person, imagined, and virtual communities connecting Greeks globally.
The mechanisms have included conventional platforms such as print media and increasingly utilize new technologies of information and knowledge dissemination such as the web. Online media designed with an explicit global reach proliferate due to the liberalization of state regulations enabling platforms such as satellite TV, the internet, and the streaming of cultural products such as film and sports. As Anastasia Panagakos’s[2] Greek Canadian ethnography shows, venues such as Napster (1999)—an online music service––or Netgammon, a backgammon site offer spaces for cyber interaction in real-time, bringing together Greeks sharing common interests, exchanging information, creating friendships, and even pursuing romantic affairs from afar. Chat rooms in Napster offer meeting places for strangers sharing the same cultural expectations, producing sentiments of broader belonging to a global community.
Mediascapes have been at the forefront of initiatives explicitly aiming to create a global imagined community. Early print media such as the pioneering—albeit now defunct—cultural magazine Odyssey: The World of Greece (founded in 1993) “appeals to those who see themselves as part of a global Greek ethnos and, by featuring stories about ‘average’ Greek diasporic communities, help to cultivate feelings of belonging and connectedness previously lacking a forum in the Greek-content media.”[3] In the domain of online news platforms, The Greek Reporter provides “a global media brand producing news from the largest Greek centers around the world & Greece, with separate portals for the USA, Australia, Canada, EU, Greece, China, Russia and the rest of the world.”
Events such as the Greek International Women Awards and the establishment of centers for disseminating regional identities (Global Center of Pontian Hellenism) produce consciousness and feelings of participating in Greek globality. Along these lines, The Hellenic Initiative (THI), “a global, nonprofit, secular institution mobilizing the Greek Diaspora and Philhellene community to support sustainable economic recovery and renewal for Greece and its people,” greatly attracts Greek professionals from London to New York City, and Sydney to Toronto. Most recently, the forthcoming inaugural Global Women and Hellenism Conference (Ioannina, September 2024) “aims to bring together Greek women from the diaspora and Greece, fostering connections, celebrating shared heritage, and igniting cultural enrichment that transcends borders.”
“Global Greek worlds” are produced across an expansively complex and largely uncharted field crisscrossed with cultural, economic, and human mobilities. The terrain “global Greeks” overflows in the broadest sense with flows of monies—corporate investments to and philanthropic funds toward Greece; the movement of people—the massive exodus of Greeks, the so-called brain drain during the so-called Greek economic crisis (2009-2018); partnerships between the “global Greek diaspora network” and corporations to attract diaspora Greeks as tourists—leading to the coinage of the term “Διασπορίτες”; the circulation of positive images associated with the global branding of Greek identity;[4] the exchange of expertise across transnational professional networks.
One notes also the mobilities of scholars working on diaspora histories and cultures and the dissemination of their research via in-person or online activities across diaspora communities and popular media. Greek Australian scholars, for example, presenting their work in Greek Canadian communities, and Greek Canadian researchers giving talks in Greece. Scholars contribute reflections in the emerging public sphere discussing and debating the ideological implications in the construction of global Hellenisms.
The discourse of “global Hellenism” has a history—largely connected with the power and interests of the Greek state—and an unfolding present loaded with a dizzying scale of complexity. Entailing intersections of flows of funds, facts, people, images, values, and ideas, this is a terrain in the making, which scholars are called to chart and illuminate. The research labour ahead is immense, requiring a bifocal lens of simultaneously attending to local ethnographic and cultural specificities (speeches, conferences, situated practices of organizations, texts) and to large-scale structures and processes (global cultural hierarchies, neoliberal capitalism, the nation-state, diaspora-historical homeland relations and affect, connections between diasporas and social movements for global justice and citizenship).
Understanding a global phenomenon calls for a global scholarly community. The discourse on global Hellenisms, now well underway, may present an opportunity to advance the interconnectivity between modern Greek and transnational modern Greek studies across continents and even spearhead scholarly collaborations, given the vastness of the phenomenon. The stakes are high, involving how Greek histories and cultures across the globe are interpreted and performed to produce future Greek worlds and their interconnections with home societies.
Critical scholarship has a vital role to play in the struggle to define the emerging imaginaries of global Hellenisms and the corresponding identities and cultural realities they have been generating.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
Ohio State University
June 2023, May 2024
Notes
1. This proliferation does not mean that a diaspora’s scope and loyalties are not regulated by the home state. See, Yiorgos Anagnostou, “Citizenship and Entrepreneurship: Greek America as Diaspora at a Time of Crisis,” In Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 107–32 (I.B. Tairus Publishers 2017).
2. Anastasia Panagakos, “Downloading New Identities: Ethnicity, Technology, and Media in the Global Greek Village.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10.2 (2003), 201–19.
3. Ibid., 213.
4. Yiorgos Anagnostou, “Private and Public Partnerships: The Greek Diaspora’s Branding of Philotimo as Identity.” Journal of Greek Media & Culture 7.1 (2021): 3–25.