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Gender and Temporal Dissonance

  • Ομιλία της Άρτεμης Λεοντή με θέμα "Gender and Temporal Dissonance in the Archive of 20th-Century Hellenism"
  • 10/05/2023 και ώρα 19:00
  • αιθ. Πολυμέσων

Η Άρτεμις Λεοντή είναι καθηγήτρια Νέων Ελληνικών στην έδρα Κ. Π. Καβάφη των Τμήματων Κλασικών Σπουδών και Συγκριτικής Φιλολογίας του Πανεπιστημίου του Μίσιγκαν. Είναι συγγραφέας του βιβλίου Τοπογραφίες ελληνισμού (1995), και Εύα Πάλμερ Σικελιανού: Υφαίνονοντας τον μύθο μιας ζωής (2019, 2022) και μεταξύ άλλων συνεπιμελήτρια του τόμου Οι Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν.... Αναγνώσεις του Καβάφη (2002). Ζει στο Ανν Αρμπορ, Μίσιγκαν.

Η διάλεξη είναι σε συνδιοργάνωση με την Επιτροπή Ισότητας των Φύλων και Καταπολέμησης των Διακρίσεων του Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας.

H διάλεξη θα δοθεί στα αγγλικά και η συζήτηση μετά τη διάλεξη θα γίνει στα ελληνικά.

Σύνοψη

A large cache of hundreds of love letters of Eva Palmer (Sikelianos, 1874-1952) from the early 1900s, hidden in the Center for Asia Minor Studies since the 1970s, is now open for research. What is the story of the archive and what can we learn from reading it against its long, precarious existence in a backroom cabinet of a EU and Greek state-financed institute designated for the “collection, research, documentation, and publication of materials related to Asia Minor Greeks”?

The collection combines two-sided correspondence, photographs, and other materials from the relationship of Palmer with Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer and salonist, and many other women of letters and arts with whom they were intimately interconnected. The materials register the intensity of their romantic ties and especially their efforts to reimagine kinship, belonging, and the flows of time. Temporal frames of marriage and reproduction linked to the institutions of family and heterosexuality are replaced by challenging processes of exploration that honored the potentiality of a life of unscripted acts and new forms of community in a world that had yet to come. Palmer and Barney were among the first to reappropriate the Greek place-name “Lesbian” as a positive form of self-ascription. Their association with the poet Sappho inspired not only poetry and performances but visits to Lesbos and Leukas, and, in 1907, Palmer’s move to Leukas, and later Athens, as the wife of Angelos Sikelianos. It was her study of Greek music and work on the Delphic Festivals in the wake of the Asia Minor disaster that led Octave Merlier to retrieve a large stack of her letters from Barney’s home in Paris in 1969 and to archive them in the Center for Asia Minor Studies.

This talk will follow the twists and turns of the making of Eva Palmer’s archive, including its current state, and read manuscripts and objects in the collection with attention to the gendered, emotional, socially deviant desires they express and alternative histories and society they aspire to create. The gender and temporal dissonance —and chance resonances— of this archive’s existence, within an institute dedicated the study of Orthodox Christians in Asia Minor and their uprooting to Greece 100 years ago, in the 20th century’s first compulsory population exchange, provides an inescapable framework for asking questions about the breadth of the archive of 20th century Hellenism and the resources it hides for engaging with the social body’s constitution in the precarious present moment.

ΙΑΚΑ: Κεντρική σελίδα Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας