"Come and See What we Do": Contemporary Migrant Performances in Athens, Greece (original) (raw)

Abstract

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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References (9)

  1. Goldman, I Want to Be Ready, 5.
  2. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 14-18. 38 Ibid., x. 39 Ibid., 18. 40 Ibid., 25.
  3. 43 Personal communication (e-mail) with Panagiotis Andronikidis, a founding member of ELANADIS- TIKANOUME, 29 January 2014. The performers were Andronikidis, Asmat Arash, Angela Delichatsios, Tapha Diaw, Sedat hayta, Matrina Maragkou, Abdul hussain Nazari, Eirini Nomikou, Kozeta Prifti, Grigoris Serbis, Alphonso Thiaby, and Zoi Trandalidou.
  4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140.
  5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 224.
  6. Mitropoulos, "Autonomy, Recognition, Movement," 10.
  7. Athena Athanassiou, in Judith Butler and Athanassiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Politi- cal (London: Polity Press, 2013), 157.
  8. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 49 Athanassiou, in Dispossession, 154.
  9. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), ix. 51 Ibid., 11. 52 Ibid., 31.