KHAS ERC Performance and Politics Webinars: Christina Banalopoulou

Presentation: The Performative Politics of Greek Debt 

Speaker: Christina Banalopoulou

Moderator: Arzu Ünal

Time: Monday, September 12, 2022 at 7:30 pm Istanbul (GMT +3) / 12:30 pm New York / 5:30 pm London / 6:30 pm Central European Time

The webinar will be in English.

Please register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElcOqspzkrH9UsHTLZpB3G7f8C4UfJbomA

Zoom Meeting ID: 858 7349 2151

Password: stgabject

The sphere of finance more broadly and the politics of debt more particularly build on performance and theatricality. This lecture will shed light on the illusions that are constitutive of Greek debt, which is about a perpetually failing pay-back inseparable from Greece’s Western creditors’ postcolonial interests. This “performative misfire” of Greek debt is legitimized by the staging of Greece’s structural dependence upon the West as “independence”—a spectacle often maintained by narratives that frame Greece as the “birthplace” of Western civilization and as a direct and continuous extension of Greek antiquity. The lecture will map connections between these notions of “performative failure” and finance capital’s elusive promise to autonomize itself from industry and production.

Christina Banalopoulou holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is now the Director of Education at the Center for Kinesthetic Education and a Research Affiliate at the Laban/ Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. Christina’s work explores the interconnections between the somatic and the political. Her essays have appeared in The Journal of Philosophical Economics, Rethinking Marxism, and Performance Philosophy. In collaboration with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Rethymno, Greece, Christina has recently completed a project titled “Performing Mediterraneaness in the American South: An Ethnography of Mediterranean Solidarity in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.” She teaches performance workshops internationally, both in public spheres and institutional spaces.

This webinar series and the “Staging National Abjection” research project are sponsored by a European Research Commission Starting Grant (ERC-2019-StG, Grant ID: 852216).

Website: https://stagingabjection.com/

Twitter: @StagingAbject

Instagram: @stagingabjection

Facebook Page: ERC Staging National Abjection/ERC Ulusal Abjeksiyonu Sahnelemek