Learning to be (multi)national: Greek diasporic childhood re-memories of nationalism and nation-building in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper explores unstable, interconnected and dynamic processes of diasporic nation-building and memory-making of adult members of the Greek diaspora in Australia as they recall their childhood experiences. The paper makes two key original contributions. First, we identify the importance of the re-membered and embodied diasporic child and childhood spaces to hybrid Greek and Australian adult national identities. Second, the paper provides an empirical example of the contribution that adults’ re-membered childhoods can make to children’s geographies – these are not direct representations of the past but are creatively, affectually, individually and collectively re-membered timespaces. These contributions emerge through three interconnected themes emerging from the adults’ accounts: the importance of childhood ‘work’, particularly language acquisition, to being an embodied adult Greek and Australian; nostalgia towards homelands and, crucially and originally, Australian childhood diasporic spaces; and Forging hybrid subjectivities: the presence of the diasporic child in the Greek and Australian adult. Therefore, the paper brings together in novel ways, work on diasporic childhoods and memories, the ways in which adults in diaspora use these past timespaces in present processes of nation-building and national belonging and the value of using re-memories as a method on children’s geographies.