Hip hop culture in Greece – and especially rap music – seems to be going through a period of bloom. Since 2010, a new generation of Greek-based non-commercial rap artists has surged in popularity, making rhymes and tunes about their everyday experiences (drugs, sex, nightlife, violence, poverty), while self-producing their records and maintaining a critical stance towards mainstream culture and media. In the lyrics of most artists of the genre, misogynist and homophobic assumptions are frequently reproduced, despite the rappers’ expressed militancy against all forms of authority. The article examines this dissonance – created when sexist language is employed in critiques against power – and traces the intersections of gender, sexuality and political resistance within contemporary non-commercial rap in Greece. The authors focus on the produced masculinities and femininities, on the political subjects interpellated by the lyrics and on points of destabilizing regulatory gender norms. More specifically, they highlight the ways in which heteronormative masculinity is reinforced (even) in ‘politically conscious’ Greek-speaking rap and, within the same music genre, we look for its undoing.

A series of entangled crisis-scapes have been unfolding in the past decade in Chile, Argentina and Brazil – geographies that have been central to discourses of and about the Global South. Ranging from presidential impeachment and military control to inflation and austerity, Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian crisis-scapes have given rise to filmic expressions of queer feminist critique that challenge neo-liberal governmentality. This article focuses on indicative cinematic tendencies in these three countries, while taking into account the author’s positionality as a (Greek) researcher engaged in the anthropology of cinema and neo-liberalism. Swinging back and forth from Greece to the Southern Cone, the aim of the article is to extract what is affectively shared between seemingly disparate subjectivities and experiences of coping with the present of crises. One of the things shared is queer survivalism, as manifested in the short fiction films Apodrasi apo ton Efthrafsto Planiti (Escaping the Fragile Planet, 2020) by Thanasis Tsimpinis and Os últimos românticos do mundo (The Last Romantics of the World, 2020) by Henrique Arruda – both featuring a gay couple getting through their last day on Earth while a toxic pink cloud destroys the planet.

The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world’s premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.

This text is a conversation between Athena Athanasiou and Alkisti Efthymiou, drawing from Athena Athanasiou’s new book, Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). The conversation discusses the critical potency of collective subjectivities such as the Women in Black and expands on issues that include political agency, vulnerability in resistance, spacing appearance, performing public mourning, or the traveling of social movements, associating them with contemporary feminist and antifascist urgencies. Central to the text is the concept of non-sovereign agonism, a form of political agency that addresses (or takes into account) the dispossessed quality of subjectivity and pays attention to the relationality through which we are constituted as subjects. Author(s): Alkisti Efthymiou and Athena Athanasiou Title (English): Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 102-113 Page Count: 12 Citation (English): Alkisti Efthymiou and Athena Athanasiou, “Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 102-113.

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