Experiments on Puerile Nations or the Impossibility of Surpassing your Father: The case of Anglo-Greek dialogue

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post-colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo-Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo-Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation-building and British imperialism.