Just across the Aegean

Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time and memory that touch on the cryptic and visceral elements of gender and power. The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in this volume examine her films in relation to subjects ranging from the history of Greeks in South Africa, trauma and cultural memory, and her relationship with the French New Wave to her feminist-inflected articulations of form and content and how her films comment on apartheid. They also highlight her global South perspective to articulate a mode of filmmaking highly responsive to histories of violence, displacement, and migration as well as pleasure, joy, and renewal. The essays, which are paired with vivid stills from Siopis’s films throughout, collectively widen the understanding of Siopis’s oeuvre. Opening new vocabularies of thought for engaging with her films, this volume outlines how her work remakes the possibilities of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

This book is a comparative—intergenerational and interregional—history of Asia Minor memories and identities of forced displacement that examines the multilayered relationship between contemporary attitudes and refugee past. Marking the centenary of the Asia Minor population transfer in the context of Greece’s contemporary migration crisis, the research questions that this book addresses are: how have memories of the 1922–24 forced displacement changed over time from one generation to the next? How do people with these memories and identities think about subsequent migration? Following a regional history approach and an oral history approach, this study draws upon literature from several disciplines and rests upon oral testimony. Specifically, it employs a methodology of collecting primary sources using oral testimonies (262 life history interviews) and archival evidence (five thousand oral testimonies) based on three regional case studies, namely the borderland island of Lesvos, Central Macedonia in northern Greece, and Attica. This book argues that refugee identity is a capacious and dynamic platform of ongoing understanding as well as a limited space of domination and competition. Elucidating the attitudes of refugee descendants and unfolding key patterns about the complex role of refugee memory and identity, it brings together the intersection of three interlocking elements: time (refugee generations), place (refugee locations), and subsequent migration (waves of other migrations). In short, A Century of Asia Minor Refugees in Greece sheds light on the convoluted relationship between contemporary attitudes and refugee past, providing a nuanced history of the 1922–24 memories and identities of forced displacement.

This chapter brings together the three interlocking elements of this study: time (refugee generations), place (refugee locations), and subsequent migration (waves of other migrations), exploring the attitudes of Asia Minor descendants towards other migrants and refugees. Through the lens of comparative analysis, the question that this book addresses is: how do people with memories and identities of the 1922–24 forced displacement think about subsequent migration? Building on the richness and diversity of the oral history testimonies, as derived from the previous chapters, this chapter sheds light on the complex, nuanced, and multidirectional attitudes of people with refugee origins. In this context, the geographical and intergenerational perspectives of this research and ultimately their intersection reveal the continuities and discontinuities that characterize the Janus-faced attitudes of refugee descendants, leading to empathy, hostility, and competition.

The current political crisis, conflicts and riots in many Middle Eastern and African countries have led to massive migration waves towards Europe. European countries, receiving these migratory waves as first port of entry (POE) over the past few years, were confronted with several challenges as a result of the sheer volume of newly arriving refugees. This humanitarian refugee crisis represents the biggest displacement crisis of a generation. Although the refugee crisis created significant challenges for all national healthcare systems across Europe, limited attention has been given to the role of primary health care (PHC) to facilitate an integrated delivery of care by enhancing care provision to refugees upon arrival, on transit or even for longer periods. Evidence-based interventions, encompassing elements of patient-centredness, shared decision-making and compassionate care, could contribute to the assessment of refugee healthcare needs and to the development and the implementation of training programmes for rapid capacity-building for the needs of these vulnerable groups and in the context of integrated PHC care. This article reports on methods used for enhancing PHC for refugees through rapid capacity-building actions in the context of a structured European project under the auspices of the European Commission and funded under the 3rd Health Programme by the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency (CHAFEA). The methods include the assessment of the health needs of all the people reaching Europe during the study period, and the identification, development, and testing of educational tools. The developed tools were evaluated following implementation in selected European primary care settings.

Because it ... den[ies] other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces people it dominates to ask themselves question constantly: reality, who am I? Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth I was ... being transformed into a young woman with a future. What I was most interested in was myself and what I would become. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not Introduction In World Memory, a collection of essays on trauma, memory, and witnessing in global contexts, Jill Bennett and I argued that trauma studies has been circumscribed by its predominant focus on Euro-American events and experiences and particularly Holocaust. We called for a transformation of field from a monocultural discipline grounded in a psychoanalytic methodology to a mode of enquiry that can inform study of memory within a changing global context. To facilitate this transformation, we advocated that trauma scholars engage with the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture, and that postcolonial critics engage with trauma studies to develop frameworks for analyzing traumatic legacies of colonialism (5). Our concern was not simply that trauma studies was impoverished by failing to address non-Western memories of trauma and loss. Rather, we were concerned that opportunities for understanding historical traumas and sufferings of other cultures transmitted through truth commissions, literature, film, and visual art were being denied by Western orientation of trauma studies. If trauma's address beyond itself was indeed, Cathy Caruth proposed, to function as a means of moving out of a 'historical isolation,' it would be necessary for literary and cultural critics to engage with diverse testimonial practices and cultural languages of trauma (11). In recent years, trauma studies has become increasingly global, although there is still, arguably, limited dialogue regarding core concepts and frameworks of postcolonial theory and trauma theory. In this essay, I pursue project of wording trauma studies through a reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga's recent novel The Book of Not (2006), which addresses issues of trauma, colonialism, and denial during violent transformation from white-minority rule in Rhodesia in 1970s to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980s. This novel, a compelling contribution to contemporary literature of trauma, expands canon beyond Western experiences, introducing new voices, subjectivities, and legacies of colonial trauma. At same time, it enables critics to ask to what extent Western trauma theory provides a productive lens through which to address issues of postcolonialism, racism, and identity. As I write in April 2007, stories about political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, desperate state of its people, and brutalities being perpetrated against opponents of Mugabe regime feature regularly in international media, a potent reminder of how unresolved legacies of colonial trauma haunt global future. Along with novels such Yvonne Vera's Stone Virgins (2002), The Book of Not is part of a recent flowering of Zimbabwean women's writing, that is concerned with, among other things, war of liberation and its after-effects. (1) Much of historical and fictional literature of Zimbabwean war has been written by men and has obscured women's experiences of war (Lyons 26). Whereas Mothers of Revolution presents oral testimony from Zimbabwean women involved in war, Dangarembga innovatively uses irony, humor, and farce to dramatize absurdities of racism in a colonial society and impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The novel dramatizes narrator's struggle to break out of a repetition compulsion, manifested in her obsessive desire for recognition, which continually leaves her deflated and depressed. …