Introduction: Framing Greek Exoticism. History and the Current Crisis

Abstract

The 10-year-old Greek crisis has pulled the country out of the universe of its dominant and largely hackneyed European, Balkan and Mediterranean representations. It has also challenged its international image. With negative and stereotypical terms at the beginning and an idealizing exoticism later, Greece found itself at the centre of global public interest. Starting with an ideal type of the insurgent or/and alternative country, the cultural and ideological matrixes of the western capitalist centre will give birth to a new grammar of Greece as a place of authenticity, as the ideal radical democracy, against neoliberal globalization The dominant mechanisms of perception and understanding, despite their variety, appropriate Greece as the place of their political and cultural imaginary. In brief, through this peculiar exoticism, they tend to organize the exacerbation of globalization and the social liquidation of the Western-capitalist canon itself.