Migration, morals, and memory: political genealogies of a transnational Greek left

Abstract

In this article, I explore the memory narratives of political migrants who fled the Greek junta in the 1960s and 1970s and established an anti-dictatorship movement in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from recent contributions in cultural sociology, I track the political genealogies that emerge in accounts and highlight the evaluative grammars that underpin both representations of the past and understandings of the contemporary economic crisis in Greece. In doing so, I make a case for approaching diasporic memory as a form of boundary work. I argue that former activists mobilize a complex set of moral criteria when drawing lines between themselves and others and that these portrayals have no resemblance to representations of this group in the academic literature. This article further demonstrates the need for ethnographically thick treatments of diasporic memory practices as well as the contributions gained by placing theories of (e)valuation in dialog with memory studies.