Hypatia Vourloumis completed her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University. A lecturer at the International Centre of Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies and Drury University Centre in Greece, she recently edited an anthology and published her research on contemporary Indonesian performance. She is currently completing a book on the politics, poetics and performance of counter-public language in postcolonial Indonesia. Her research interests, including modern Greek and postcolonial Southeast Asian cultural production, focus broadly on performance theory, critical literary and cultural theory, minority discourse, transnational feminisms, popular culture and performances of race, sexuality and gender.

Research Project

Fugitive Borders: Performances of a Critical Common

This proposal seeks to extend and deepen the parameters of my research on trans-civic cross-cultural immigrant performances in Greece within and across larger economic, social and political contexts. As the Greek economic crisis intensifies, so does institutional violence against minority groups. In response to the rising nationalist discourse and extreme far right movements, my current project aims to unravel the ramifications of the interweaving between economic policies and forces and the state’s proliferation of internal ‘borders’ meant to mark and police, in Nicos Poulantzas terms, the ‘internal enemy’ and the ‘antinational.’ In this light, I study current immigrant cultural production against the backdrop of and alongside self-organized, autonomous social movements that presently perform a resistant ‘common’ within the Greek public sphere. My project argues for a heterogeneous understanding of this antagonistic ‘common,’ seeking to problematize a sign often used to characterize social mobilizations, such as demonstrations, occupations, squats and people’s assemblies emerging as a response to the crisis. Critiquing the separation of citizens and non-citizens within the ‘common,’ my research thinks through how their respective interconnected performances denounce and resist economic subjugation and seizure through ‘antinational’ presences manifested at constructed ‘borders’ within the public sphere. While emphasizing the differing complexities and particularities between and within the varying struggles studied, I want to bring attention to a common appeal, a negotiation with and refusal of the state and its language enacted through fugitive performances that grapple with the politics and aesthetics of belonging, constituent difference, illegality and presence.

Recommended Publications

• Mezzadra, S./Neilson, B., Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
• Poulantzas, N., State, Power, Socialism. New ed., introd. Stuart Hall. London: Verso, 2000 [1978].
• Joseph, M., Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.