Schematising hospitality: Ai WeiWei’s activist artwork as a form of dark travel

The article provides a holistic appraisal of activist-artist Ai WeiWei’s work. It argues that, despite its topical innovations and evolution, it continues to be informed by narratives of ‘hospitality’ as an experiential form of engagement with variations of otherness (father, migrant, tourist and refugee). Dividing Ai’s artwork into two overlapping phases of development (national and international/global), it considers the artist’s construction of a cosmopolitan identity with uses of ‘technology’ as embodied and communal property. As Ai’s work on the refugee crisis on Lesbos attests, his (dark) artistic cosmopolitan symbolisations use geo-political imaginaries of justice and hospitality in subsequent projects.     

Experiments on puerile nations,or the impossibility of surpassing your father: the case of the Anglo‐Greek dialogue

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post‐colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo‐Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo‐Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation‐building and British imperialism.     

Breaking Bad,Making Good: Notes on a Televisual Tourist Industry

This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the ‘televisual tourism’ centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show’s sites, scenes and tastes in the city of Albuquerque. This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression.     

Giving gifts (and then taking them back): identity,reciprocity and symbolic power in the context of Athens 2004

The paper identifies discursive tropes that informed the official Greek rhetoric of the Athens Olympiad. It is argued that in order to understand these tropes, which place emphasis on the Olympics as an aspect of Neohellenic heritage, we must re‐consider the impact the Orientalist movement had on the formation of a distinctively modern Greek identity. The version of Orientalism that informed the Greek rhetoric was based on the Eurocentric belief that Hellas is the cradle of civilisation. The Western conviction that the modern Greeks (or Neohellenes) are not worthy of “their Hellenic heritage” because they are more Oriental than European is coupled with Greece’s economic and political dependency on Western resources. However, in the context of 2004 Greeks contested this power relationship with “the West”, both European and American. The Greek argument was grounded on the equation of Greek‐Hellenic cultural, with Western economic‐political, capital. Tensions characterised the Greek argument: on the one hand, the Olympics were regarded as a relational (universal) value that ought to circulate in an international reciprocal system; hence, their return to their “cradle” was deemed a form of recognition of the Hellenic (and by right of heritage, modern Greek) contribution to human civilisation. On the other hand, Greeks demanded exclusivity in their organisation. This paper follows this debate, maintaining that we can trace its foundational principles in the Greek moral, cosmological, order.     

Unclaimed Colonies: Anglo-Greek Identities Through the Prism of the Dilessi/Marathon Murders (1870)

This paper examines the Anglo-Greek dialogue on Greek and British European identities following the Dilessi/Marathon Murders, a case of kidnapping and murder of three upper class Britons by Greek brigands, which became the European cause célèbre of the 1870s. It focuses on British and Greek narratives of brigandage and uses them to provide some insight into the ways both sides conceptualised modernity. The uses of the Greek, Irish and Scottish past and present in this dialogue formed a discourse in which history, imperialism and romanticism were woven altogether. This paper argues that these intertwined ideas and processes were complicit in the formation of modern British and Greek national identities.     

Mediating cosmopolitanism: crafting an allegorical imperative through Beijing 2008

The article examines intertwined cosmopolitan and national narratives in the context of the Beijing 2008 Games. Through a discursive analysis of the opening and closing ceremonies it seeks to provide some insight into understandings of Chinese national identity as a ‘displaced’ agent in the ‘birth’ and ‘evolution’ of Western European civilisation, who returns to claim a central place in human history. The artistic production of such resentful discourses develops alongside its technological counterpart, providing insight into the ways national citizenships remain gendered and racialised. For activist networks and the critics of the Olympic project this ‘mediated’ cosmopolitanism harbours a performative contradiction, as it sanctions Chinese policies that erase certain social identities from the nation-state. The multicultural ambiance of the Olympic mega-event symbolically resolves the crisis generated by the calls for national development through careful urban planning that violates human rights. An interdisciplinary analysis of the two ceremonies and secondary material suggests that national self-narration takes place simultaneously in different expressive/visual modes, enabling the coexistence (and communication) of the ‘symbolic’ with the ‘material’ in what I will term an ‘allegorical imperative’. This imperative, a miniature of the Olympic discourse on human dignity, is constitutive of the anthropopoetic project.