Redistribution via Appropriation: White(washing) Marbles

See, for example, the situation around the LD50 gallery in London, as recounted by J. J. Charlesworth in his article “The strange case of the ‘alt-right’ art gallery,” Art Review, March 3, 2017 →.

Here I use the verb “institute” in reference to Maria Hlavajova’s call for “instituting otherwise." lease refer to her talk at CCA Singapore “The Making of an Institution — Reason to Exist: The Director’s Review. Instituting Otherwise” March 22nd, 2017. Video soon to be available on the CCA website.

Of course, the Roman Empire is another signifier used by the WWW order—Ancient Greece being its predecessor.

A poll from January 13, 2018 shows that support for Golden Dawn has fallen 0.2 percent, but it is still the fourth-largest party in parliament, with 6.7 percent of the vote.

Private conversation with Håvard Bustnes, March 2018.

The phrase “country, religion, family” first appeared in 1851 in the writings of the Greek theologian Apostolos Makrakis. He claimed that in a vision, Christ and the Virgin Mary appeared before him to ask for the salvation of men—especially Orthodox Greeks, so they could strengthen their glorious nation. To do this, said Makrakis, the “Western ideologies” should be rejected and an Orthodox Christian state should be established. From 1880 onwards, “country, religion, family” was a common phrase in pious Christian circles in Greece, and by 1936, during the first dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, the phrase was widely known. The colonels of the 1967 dictatorship used the phrase as an official campaign motto, making it even more popular. Golden Dawn has continued this trajectory.

Santos states in his lecture “Epistemologies of the South and the Future”: “By the eighteenth century, Portugal was an informal colony of England: it was an imperial centre that, in financial terms, was dominated by, or subordinated to, the hegemonic control of the British Empire. In addition, we also witnessed a rise of differences within the ‘Western World.’ Southern Europe became a periphery, subordinated in economic, political, and cultural terms to northern Europe and the core that produced the Enlightenment. This has been my debate with some postcolonial thinkers, particularly in Latin America, but also in Europe, who think that there is just one Europe or just one Western modernity. I think that the situation shows that from the very beginning there has been an internal colonialism in Europe. This has now become very visible with the financial crisis. In one of my studies, I argue that the Portuguese and the Spanish in the seventeenth century were described by the northern Europeans in the same terms that the Portuguese and the Spaniards attributed to the indigenous and native peoples in the New World and Africa. They were described as lazy, lascivious, ignorant, superstitious, and unclean. Such descriptions were applied to them by the monks that came from Germany or France to visit the monasteries and the people in the South.” See →.

Here, “core,” “semi-peripheral,” and “peripheral” are terms borrowed from world-systems theory and economics.

It’s worth recalling Winston Churchill’s famous phrase: “It is not Greeks that fight like heroes, but heroes that fight like Greeks.” This was propaganda proper, but Churchill shortly changed his tune, collaborated with the conservative right that had formerly worked with the Nazis, and these leftist “heroes” were exiled to concentration camps on Greek islands, where they were tortured for years, or deported to Russia after being denied their passports and nationality. For the past few years I have been conducting interviews with the remaining survivors of this conflict, collecting oral histories and testimonies. See this interesting article on the British involvement in Greece in The Guardian →.

Konstantinos Karamanlis, June 12, 1976, speaking at the Greek parliament on Greece’s entry into the EEC. Video of the speech (in Greek) can be found at →.

This phrase first appeared in 1842, with the formation of the “Great Idea” in a text by Markos Renieris, later the head of the first Greek National Bank.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

For more information on US categorizations of Greeks and other migrant communities in relation to their skin color, see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).

See, for instance, an interview with Günter Grass from 2012 entitled “Shame Europe!” (in German) →.

Europe’s core financial countries heavily influence the decisions of the IMF and the Troika, and in turn the IMF holds power over them and the EU parliament. The private banking sector also holds a great deal of influence in relation to all these Extra States and their decision-making. The idea of “Extra States” is developed in my upcoming curatorial project Extra States: Nations in Liquidation for Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp.

Please see my previous text co-authored with Yanis Varoufakis →

See María Iñigo Clavo, “Modernity vs. Epistimodiversity,” e-flux journal 73 (May 2016) →.

Derrida’s neologism is derived from the merging of “hostility” and “hospitality.” For more, see Jacques Derrida, “Foreigner Question: Coming from Abroad/From the Foreigner,” in Of Hospitality, eds. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Jacques Derrida, “HOSTIPITALITY,” Angelaki Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3–18.

For more on European integration policies towards migrants from 1973 onwards, see J. Doomernik and M. Bruquetas-Callejo, “National Immigration and Integration Policies in Europe Since 1973,” in Integration Processes and Policies in Europe, eds. B. Garcés-Mascareñas and R. Penninx (Springer, 2016).

Apart from the rare appearance of engaging critical discourse in the Greek press and public sphere, critique in Greece is usually conducted by male academics. They hail from various disciplines (often referring to themselves as “curators”), and they have a tendency to overestimate and abuse their power. They provide dated, dusty academic analyses of art, in which they exclusively quote long-dead white Northern European males, reinforcing the WWW patriarchal order.

The conference, which was organized by L’Internationale, took place on September 22, 2017.

In a cruel historical irony, these buildings designed to represent ancient glory were constructed by the same hands that had been emptied of their cultural property by the West. From the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, cheap imported labor arrived in Northern Europe from the colonies to sustain the wealth of empires. From the 1950s onwards the labor came from Greece, Turkey, Italy, North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Eastern Bloc, and the Middle East. If one reframes instances of economic “redistribution” as purposeful taking, such expropriation is clearly in line with longstanding European policies.

For extensive analysis on the 1930s cleaning of the Parthenon Marbles, see →.

Among other things, the term “whitewashing” refers to the practice in Hollywood of casting white actors to play the roles of POC. (Please see definitions on Wikipedia → and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary →.) I use the term here to indicate the traditional meaning of the term in international English (to cover up and minimize an action) but also to address the action of whitening—both literally in the case of the Parthenon Marbles, but also figurative in the “whitening” of Ancient Greece by the white European order.

Dennis C. Mueller, Reason, Religion, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Paper published by the Ministry of Labour of Greece, December 2017.

Achille Mbembe, “Difference and Self-Determination,” e-flux journal 80 (March 2017) →.

This is what Clelia O. Rodriguez calls an “appropriation for intellectual masturbation.” See →.

The action took place on April 5, 2017 in front of the Parthenon on the Acropolis Hill in Athens.

Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press, 1997).

Painter, History of White People.