Nineteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

“What has the dually descended modern Greek taken from his father, what from his mother? [. . .] When he begins to sing, a universal bitterness leaps up from his oriental bowels, breaks through the crust of Greek logic and, from the depths of his being, totally mysterious and dark, the Orient emerges.” This quote from the Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis conceptualizes the musical tradition of rebetiko as a metaphor for the Greek body––evidencing a discourse that invests in the mythical binary of the “Orient” versus the “Occident” in order to determine to which Greece belongs. The diasporic nature of rebetiko, its Levantine flavor, and its development by refugees from the Greco-Turkish War all contributed to the stigmatization that defined rebetiko’s aesthetic and made it a contested vehicle for popular resistance during the Junta years during the 60s and 70s. In view of this history, I propose a queer reading of rebetiko to respond to the current moment of nationalism in Greece, catalyzed by the entry of the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party into Greek parliament in 2012. By reciprocally reading for rebetiko in queer texts, and reading for queerness in rebetika texts, I argue that “queering” rebetiko destabilizes intrinsically related and binarized categorizations of “male/occidental” versus “female/oriental” that coalesce around nationalist discourse, ultimately dispelling the myth of the national subject and reifying rebetiko’s potential as a vehicle of resistance.