1821, Before and After

Abstract

1821, Before and After Yanni Kotsonis (bio) The title of the original call for papers for this special section, “1821 in 2021,” called into question the idea of a single year as both a beginning and an end. The era did not begin in 1821 when the Greek Revolution broke out, but had a prehistory; it did not end in 1830 when the Greek state was established, but set in motion dynamics of belonging and exclusion that are still with us. At the same time, the Greek Revolution was not only a Greek affair: it had roots in, and then reverberated across, a wider region. These are the two themes, temporal and spatial, that emerge from the four articles that survived the rigors of the review process. They beckon towards other large themes that will no doubt be under discussion during the anniversary year. I review some of them here. Where was Greece before there was a Greece? We should not forget that Greece and the Greek Revolution incubated, necessarily, in countries not called Greece, subjects of something other than a Greek sovereign or an independent Greek state. Elisavet Papalexopoulou writes of women translators who used a Greek language and helped consolidate its literary use, spread out over various countries to which they owed their allegiance but still able to represent themselves as part of a Greek community. What would today be an awkward mix of loyalties was at the time quite normal, since state loyalty and national consciousness were not coterminous. Studying translators from before the Revolution, Papalexopoulou shows Greece to be a transimperial affair (it was too soon to say “transnational,” the nation-state being too new and exceptional), with subjects of one or another king or emperor forging links that cut across geopolitical boundaries. If it was a blurry situation, it was not abnormal. The translators studied by Papalexopoulou used a language that had no state—excepting the Ionian Islands when they became a statelet under Russian protection, where Greek was declared the official language in documents written in Venetian Italian (Zanou 2019). These literary activists created a vibrant world of letters that would, ultimately, go looking for a state. Why Greeks decided that they needed a state, and why at that moment, is still an open question and the answer is not obvious. To put it another way, why did at least some Greeks [End Page vii] conclude that being Greek in one or another empire or kingdom, a condition that allowed them to flourish, was inadequate? Nor was the Revolution and its prehistory simply a male affair, and a focus on the odd woman fighter like Bouboulina will not do. The problem here is not simply that women must have been doing something during the Revolution, even if it was not fighting; more broadly, we tend to assume that the Greeks (as opposed to the Rum) were the ones who took up arms, and in the practice of independent Greece the paternal line determined the citizenship of the offspring (Vogli 2007). But many more took up pens and very many of them were women. Surely this was fundamental to the nurturing of a language, a consciousness, and a generation of people who would style themselves as Greek, and it was the precondition for the Revolution that followed. That these women were mainly translators is in keeping with a sense of feminine propriety and humility whereby a woman could transmit someone else’s words but not craft her own, eliding the fact that translation is itself a creative process. Papalexopoulou invites us to consider the imperial spaces in which the new consciousness was being cultivated. This brings us to the empires, and the new imperial intersections and encounters, that began in 1797 with the arrival of the French Republic off the Balkan coasts and made the southern Balkans a contested space. Somehow, the encounter between Greeks as Rum and Γκραι-κοί (Graiki, one kind of imperial Greek), and Greeks as Grecs, греки, and Greeks (another kind of imperial Greek) produced something new: Hellenes and Hellas. The novelty of the concept and the timing of the uprising remain strangely and deeply unexplained: it is still generally assumed that Greeks had...