Maria Boletsi

Still Waiting for Barbarians after 9/11?: Cavafy's Reluctant Irony and the Language of the Future

C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) has been adapted and restaged in art, music, and literature throughout the twentieth century. Since the early 1990s, and especially since the events on 11 September 2001, however, it seems to be haunting the Western imaginary. Its various allegorical uses in the press and cultural theory demonstrate the poem’s prominent figuration in debates about post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities. Cavafy’s poem is mobilized in critiques of the American Empire. It helps express the fear of others or of the unknown after the purported rupture of 9/11. But it also captures the desire for overturning saturated systems and forming new narratives and communities in the context of the financial crisis and recent protest movements. Besides functioning as an allegorical formula for capturing contemporary (global) realities, the poem also assumes a mediating function in current debates: it seeks alternative expressive modes, beyond metaphysical truths and essentialist oppositions, as well as beyond cultural relativism. This function takes effect through the poem’s evocation of two genealogies of “barbarism”: a negative and an affirmative one. The poem neither rejects nor fully affirms either of these genealogies. It thereby generates a kind of irony that can be termed “reluctant” in its questioning of and simultaneous attraction to metaphysics and presence. Through its reluctant irony, the poem seeks a viable practice of living in liminal times—a practice much needed in (our) times of crisis.

How to Do Things With Poems Performativity in the Poetry of C.P. Cavafy

Abstract The theory of the performative – in its initial version by J.L. Austin and in its poststructuralist revisions – allows us to explore speech acts within C.P. Cavafys poem as well as how his poems themselves can function as performatives. Performativity in these poems functions along four interrelated planes of performance, all of which are central to Cavafys poetry: the erotic, the theatrical/public, the historical, and the linguistic. Recurring instances of “infelicitous” performatives in Cavafys poems, especially unkept promises, reveal the critical and creative potential of this infelicity. The repeated failures and communicative gaps in the poems nevertheless work towards a notion of a felicitous poetic event, in which failure is transformed into a critical act and a motivating force for practices of constant revaluation.

Crisis, Terrorism, and Post-Truth: Processes of Othering and Self-Definition in the Culturalization of Politics

This essay revisits the historical narrative of the Roman Empire and its ‘barbarians’ and its evocations in Western public rhetoric since 1989. It sketches the political climate since the early 1990s that gave shape to what has been called the culturalization of politics—a redrawing of global political divides in terms of culture—and probes the rekindled rhetoric of civilization and barbarian invasions in relation to this discursive shift. In this context, the essay centers on two issues. First, it enters recent debates on terrorism in Western media and politics, comparing uses of barbarism with uses of the savage and the monster in responses to terror—a comparison that reveals the conflicting frames guiding the perception of ‘Islamic’ and ‘white’ terrorism. Second, it traces the ambivalent workings of the barbarian-figure in the terrain of ‘post-truth politics,’ where the barbarian is mobilized both for designating threatening external others and as a potentially affirmative figure for (self-)representation. The focus here lies on the role of the barbarian in the profiling of the political persona that has come to exemplify this politics: Donald J. Trump.

Europe and Its Discontents: Intra-European Violence in Dutch Literature After 9/11

In several novels from Europe and the US that address the climate of fear, crisis, Islamophobia, and terrorism in the post-9/11 era, the agents of violence are non-Western others living within or outside Western societies—terrorists, fundamentalists, migrants. This chapter traces a different trend in Dutch literature after 9/11: an engagement with forms of violence endemic in European societies or exercised by Western European subjects—predominantly frustrated, disillusioned white men. The chapter discusses intra-European violence in five novels by Arnon Grunberg, Robert Anker, Elvis Peeters, Yves Petry, and Bart Koubaa, against the backdrop of the current European crisis rhetoric and Dutch rhetoric on migration and multiculturalism. Delving into Europe’s uglier sides, these novels suggest that imagining new, better narratives after 9/11 requires facing the contradictions within the self-image of Europe and the liberal subject.

Made just like me: The homosexual Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality by Dimitris Papanikolaou (review)

perceptions of Constantinople (Tsarigrad, as it was known in Russia) and its crucial position within the nineteenth-century Russian political agenda (Tina Georgieva). Although the chapters are varied in both approach and theme, certain emphases recur. For example, most chapters destabilize or challenge entrenched clichés and nationalist stereotypes in both Bulgarian and Greek historiographies. To some extent, the volume’s content mirrors Nadia Danova’s own contributions to the fields of intellectual and political history, even though recently she expanded her research to include socioeconomic themes (which issues some of the chapters do likewise explore). And yet within this versatility and high productivity, Danova is one of the scholars who have researched Greek-Bulgarian relations beyond antagonisms, exploring cultural transfers and daily social practices. She also heralded studies on the image/perception of the Other, or so-called imagology, in Bulgarian historiography, another topic that figures prominently in this collection. Many chapters in this volume likewise escape the narrow nationalist framework and interpret historical past within broader Ottoman and European contexts. This collection is an informative and valuable contribution to the study of cultural and national identities, modernization, and sociopolitical and economic transformations of the Ottoman Balkans, the post-Ottoman nation-states, and the post-Cold War conditions. By promoting academic dialogue, many authors not only address issues considered until recently inconvenient by their respective national historiographies but also offer critical interpretations to some sanitized renditions of the recent past. The book has a wider significance for the entangled history of Southeast Europe, Ottoman studies, and nationalism and thus would be of interest to students and researchers in those interdisciplinary fields.