#crypto-colonialism

The Trolls Accused Me of ‘Crypto-Colonialism’ in Syria – I’m Listening

Rachel-Rose O’Leary is a reporter at CoinDesk, covering how cryptocurrencies are being used in areas of economic, social and political unrest.

This article is part of her ongoing dispatches from Rojava, Syria. 

“Crypto-colonist.”

“Neo-fascist.”

These are two of the more critical responses to my relocation to North Syria, also known as Rojava, to assist in a newly formed academy of media and…

The Nation and its Ruins  Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece  by   Yannis Hamilakis

Preface  viii

...Yet my focus here is not classical antiquity itself, nor Hellenism as understood by most western scholars (the idealization of classical antiquity in western Europe from the eighteenth century onwards; cf. Morris 1994), but a diVerent set of Hellenisms: the neo-Hellenism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imported into Greece, and mostly what I called Indigenous Hellenism—the appropriation of western Hellenism by local societies in Greece in the mid to late nineteenth century and its recasting as a novel, syncretic, and quasi-religious form of imagining time and place, past and present, of producing viii Preface and reproducing national identities (see Sigalas 2001 for the mean- ings and uses of the term Hellenism in Greece; cf. also Koumbourlis 1998).

   Memories Cast in Marble: Introduction p.20

Chatterjee thus suggests that it is not just that colonialism and nationalism share notions of essentialist identities—it is also the self-portrayal of western Enlightenment thinking (the basis of both colonial and national ‘regimes of truth’; cf. Foucault 1980: 133 on the concept) as being not only universal but also the naturalized state of aVairs that becomes the problem here. Greece has not been formally colonized as such, but the process of its production as a modern nation-state amounts to that of colonization, not simply by the ideas of western modernity but also by the processes, apparatuses, and groups instrumental in shaping and propagating this new world order. This approach has been gaining ground recently, and some studies have started analysing Greek nationalism from the point of view of post-colonial studies (e.g. Tziovas 1995; Gourgouris 1996), while Herzfeld (2002) has talked of crypto-colonialism to describe cases like Greece (cf. also Panourgia 2004). This study will attempt to examine, where appropriate, the intersection between nationalism and colonialism. It will be shown in Chapter 3, for example, that the main processes that invested antiquities with the properties of sacred icons for both the Hellenic national imagination and European consciousness were initiated by Greek intellectuals and the European administrators and scholars. In the newly founded, independent state of Greece, both the Wrst professor of archaeology and the designer of the Wrst archaeological law were Bavarians belonging to the entourage of the Wrst king, Otto.