"Come and See What we Do": Contemporary Migrant Performances in Athens, Greece (original) (raw)
In an essay titled "Autonomy, Recognition, Movement," Angela Mitropoulos writes that while capital relies on the nation-state and law "so as to enter the field of class struggle, working-class struggles can occur independently of any given form and level of representation." 1 Citing Mario Tronti's thesis that working-class movements at the global level can be seen as a "strategy of refusal," Mitropoulos points to how this notion of autonomy has become "pivotal to discussions of migration, border policy, and global capital." 2 Focusing on migration in order to attend to the nationalist strains often prevalent within anti-globalization and anticapitalist protests, she suggests that an understanding of class as a moving, global composition questions the inevitability of the nation-state as the necessary condition for representing class struggles. Furthermore, she insists that an uncritical approach to the inexorability of the nation-state, at the level of state policy as well as the "progressive" politics within it, makes possible the depiction of migrants "as bereft of political action, indeed of activism." 3 Therefore she argues that "the concept of the autonomy of migration is an insistence that politics does not need to be the property of the state and those who-however implicitly and by dint of a claim to belong to it, as the subject that is proper to it (its property)-can claim to reserve for themselves the thought and action that is deemed properly political." 4 Following Mitropoulos's lead, this essay engages with the concept of the autonomy of migration through an analysis of contemporary migrant performance practices in Greece. I engage critically with the performative action, activism, and political presence of ELANADISTIKANOUME (Come and see what we do), a performance group
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