Reflections

Maria Boletsi, University of Amsterdam

From the outset, the workshop’s theme – “Sovereignty, Space and Aesthetics: Greece and Europe in the World” – was marked by a distinct situatedness and an ambitious generality. Rarely does a workshop succeed so wonderfully in teasing out the global resonances of particular spaces and the ways disparate spaces ‘rub’ each other without collapsing into the same generalized totality: Greece and Europe, the Aegean and the Caribbean archipelago, quotidian and utopian spaces, spaces of empire past and present, spaces of crisis, imprisonment or exile (refugee camps, prisons, exilic islands) and open spaces of limitlessness, like the sea.

Thanks to a remarkable group of international participants and interlocutors – scholars, activists, people working with NGOs, locals from Molyvos – the spaces of theory, literature, and activism also emerged in this workshop as intertwined forces in the same nexus and as necessary conditions for thinking and acting in the world – and for thinking the world differently. The talks and discussions we had during the four intensive days of the workshop illuminated the ways theory, literature, and activism all pass through specific places that co-shape them without limiting their global resonance and connectedness. The force of a place like Lesvos – an exemplary site for the ways the local cannot be thought of without the global, and vice versa – defined  the experience of the workshop. Our discussions took shape through an intimate engagement with the space in which the event was held, showing how thought never stands above places, just as places are always traversed and haunted by other places and times.

Thanks to an exceptional constellation of participants, the warm hospitality of the organizers, and the generous support of Rutgers and SFU, the workshop felt like the start of a truly inspiring and enriching exchange that can make a difference within and beyond academia – an exchange grounded in solidarity and friendship that we all hope can be continued in the years to come.

Nikos Papadogiannis, Bangor University

In the workshop, I presented on the spatial mobility and sexuality of lesbian women from West Germany and Greece in the 1980s. My participation in the workshop has enabled me to develop my work in two directions:

1. It has helped me conceptualise my work further in three ways. First, I have discussed with other workshop participants notions of space, which I could use in my work. Second, I have exchanged ideas on how the concept of “race” may be important for my analysis. Third, I have examined in dialogue with other workshop participants the ways in which the underpinning ideas of my work compare to the work of Étienne Balibar.
2. It has enabled me to familiarize myself to migration policies in Greece and other countries from a comparative perspective. In so doing, I have found very informative the presentations of workshop participants. However, I have also learned a lot from learning from activists and the residents of Molyvos and Skala Sykamias about their attitudes to the migration policies of Greece, as they manifest themselves in Lesvos.

Overall, the format of the workshop deviated from a conventional presentation and a brief Q&A session. Rather, it encouraged long, intense and multivalent discussions after each paper, which continued over lunch and dinner and included an array of voices from scholars, activists and residents of Molyvos (with some people falling into more than one of these categories).

I would very much love to see the workshop continuing to take place. I would, obviously, be keenly interested in participating in it again. I would like to make a two-fold contribution through my future participation:

1. I would aim to build on the mobilities paradigm, as developed by John Urry and Mimi Sheller, and discuss the ways in which tourism is interconnected with other forms of spatial mobility. Do, for instance, displaced people who have moved through Lesvos island return to the island to reflect on their passage, in what could be depicted as a secular pilgrimage? Moreover, is tourism harmed by the movement of displaced people through Lesvos island, as some residents of Molyvos argue? Could both be combined and revolve around transcultural contact and solidarity? These are issues I would like to discuss further with the scholars/activists who participate in the workshop as well as with the residents of Molyvos and its surrounding areas.
2. I would also love to exchange ideas with them on how sexuality helps differentiate the experience of people on the move and not necessarily in the case of tourists. For instance, to what extent and in what ways do the experiences of displaced people vary due to their differing sexual orientation?

Jini Watson, NYU

Sovereignty, Space, Aestheticswas a workshop remarkable for its conceptual openness, while nevertheless resulting in a rich and rigorous set of intersecting conversations. With Molyvos as both our conference site and a specific resource for thinking through the unevenness of global processes, the diverse set of international participants (from Hellenic studies and without, from academia and activism) presented research on a number of urgent topics. With the generosity of our organizers’ institutions, Rutgers-Newark and Simon Fraser University, the workshop departed from the standard academic conference format which operates on a “fly in, fly out” ethos. The four days of the workshop consisted of formal presentations and intense discussions as well as travel to the neighboring village of Skala (site of the recent refugee reception center), walking tours, local history, and meetings with local residents, officials, and activists. With Molyvos as spatial datum for our collective inquiries, presentations explored the cultural histories of migration, population transfer and exile; the layered conceptions of “crisis” in Greece and the EU; evolving questions around Islam, empire, the nation-state and sovereignty; the comparative politics of refugee detention/deportation regimes as well as the solidarity movements that “support those who are not supported.”  This was a richly productive event that proved much more than the sum of its parts. For me, most rewarding were the methodological debates that emerged through our collective engagement around these issues: how can transregional comparative work—for example, that draws together the Aegean, the Pacific, and the Caribbean—reveal new potentialities of critique and analysis? How can we view the multiple recent “crises” (debt, refugee, the EU and global right-wing politics) in terms of alternative historical and theoretical understandings that make visible, as one presenter put it, those “transhistorical points of solidarity”? How can focusing on a site like Molyvos disclose the wider contradictions of our global moment? And given the wonderfully planned mix of scholars and activists—what is the relationship between academic research within the university and on-the-ground activism?