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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Mary N. Layoun. Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis. (Post-Contemporary Interventions.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 225. Cloth $54.95, paper $18.95.
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| In this work, Mary N. Layoun presents a wonderful analysis of three case studies of gendered cultural responses to crises of nationalism, as represented in alternative narratives of high cultural and literary tropes: the Greek Asia Minor "catastrophe" of 1922, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the Palestinian expulsion from Lebanon in the 1980s. Through an extensive reading of such diverse sources as literature, official documents, songs, poetry, cinema, public monuments, and journalism, she treats with lucidity, analytical rigor, and elegance the theme of the master narrative of gendered nationalism, dealing quite admirably with a rather complex set of historical background materials. Her analysis demonstrates that although, through specific strategies, the language and order of nationalism is employed to construct homogeneous societies, alternative gendered narratives point to different desires of heterogeneous utopian communities. |
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Layoun's first case study focuses on Greek refugees from Asia Minor, who came to Greece following the 1922 war with Turkey. Here she offers a lucid recounting of the historical events that led to the repatriation of more than 1.5 million peoples between Asia Minor and mainland Greece, showing how refugees were reconstructed as national subjects. Their testimonies, unlike the official narrative, reveal tractable borders, as well as Orthodox and Muslim intermarriage while in Asia Minor. The internationally mandated effort to construct ethnic homogeneity in Turkey and Greece that followed the Asia Minor war disrupted a social world of ethno-religious sentiments in which a sense of communal belonging and intercommunal relations had once been strong. Refugee testimonies reveal a disjuncture between public and official discourse, as their stories both reconstitute boundaries and cross over them, presenting a gendered narrative perspective from which the story of the nation is told and retold. |
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While these points are well taken, Layoun does not mention that the arrival of the refugees contributed significantly to the political construction of a modern Greek nation-state, with its largely homogeneous population (in terms of language, religion, and culture), especially in the northern territories of Macedonia and Thrace. In a sense, the Asia Minor conflict was an early international experiment in ethnic purification, and a relatively "successful" one at that. Layoun's study also might have benefited from more specialized historical sources, as well as from a different transliteration mode (spelling errors in Greek terms could be avoided by more careful and rigorous proofreading). Some historians of Greece might take issue with the assertion that the "Great Idea" was a policy of the Greek kingdom throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, or challenge the assumption that the "Great Idea" was always irredentist and militaristic in character. There is no doubt that the "Great Idea" helped to define the Asia Minor expedition, but that does not necessarily imply that the concept had as long a history as Layoun asserts. Historical contingency as well as the so-called Great Powers played an important role in turning the ideology of the continuous national community to more militaristic and violent forms of expression. |
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