Mina Karavanta
Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Theory, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Global English Literatures in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She holds degrees in English Language and Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA), and in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton (MA and Ph.D). She was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship (1995) and the Papadaki Fund from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (1995-1999), and received a full scholarship (1995-1999), a Dissertation Year Fellowship (1998-1999), and a University Award for Excellence in Research (1998-1999) from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She specializes in postcolonial studies, critical theory and comparative literature and has published numerous articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, Journal Of Contemporary Theory. Her work has also appeared in edited volumes abroad and in Greece. She has co-edited Interculturality and Gender, with Joan Anim-Addo & Giovanna Covi, (London: Mango Press, 2009) and Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, with Nina Morgan (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). She has translated George Steiner’s Heidegger into Greek (Athens: Patakis, 2009), and Haris Vlavianos’s poetry into English, Affirmation: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (Dublin: Dedalus: 2007). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Faculty of English Language and Literature and the Interdepartmental Postgraduate Translation Program of the School of Philosophy of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also been invited to teach in the UK, the US, France, Grenada in the Caribbean and Cyprus. From 2009 to 2014 she was a member of the interdisciplinary research group Travelling Concepts (ATHENA, European Thematic Network) and a co-ordinator of the research subgroup Interculturality and Gender. From 2011 to 2014 she was a research participant in “Behind the Looking-Glass: ‘“Other”-Cultures-within’ translating cultures,” an interdisciplinary network funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Grant) and co-ordinated by Professor Joan Anim-Addo (University of London, Goldsmiths). She is a founding member and co-editor of the peer-reviewed electronic journal Synthesis (synthesis.enl.uoa.gr) that promotes transcultural and interdisciplinary research and features international Editorial and Academic Boards. She has participated in international conferences and given invited talks in the US, Europe, the Caribbean and Australia.
Supervisors: William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor, SUNY at Binghamton (Supervisor)
Address: 96 Nikitara St. Voula 16673 Greece
Supervisors: William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor, SUNY at Binghamton (Supervisor)
Address: 96 Nikitara St. Voula 16673 Greece
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Papers by Mina Karavanta
Living through the Interregnum: Democracy, the Polis and the Subject in Crisis
Maro Germanou & Mina Karavanta
Special Issue Editors
The current event of the global economic recession that threatens the political, cultural and social structures of democratic states in the first decade of the twenty-first century; the insurgencies in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria; the exponential rise of unemployment and poverty in the countries of the European South; and the threatened position of the humanities and the human are stark symptoms of the waning of the symbolic, cultural and political capital of modernity. Indeed, the destabilization, even precarious position of democracy in the age of transnational capitalism, the dissolution of social bonds and alliances, and the disappearance of labor rights and laws are only a few of the symptoms of living through the interregnum, a term that Étienne Balibar, invoking Antonio Gramsci, has recently used to describe this age of crisis. If this is an age of ends, it is also an age of beginnings, an age of “just befores,” just before the consolidation of the new formations, collectivities, and discourses that harbor the promise of the new. Democracy, the polis and the subject are in crisis; yet, this crisis constitutes a multitudinous event that affiliates the political, social and economic claims of different peoples from various territories and cultures that now share the anxiety over the exhausted capital of modernity on which they have unevenly drawn.
Signifying both the promise of the new and the destruction of the old, the event of the crisis summons the histories of the concepts of democracy, the polis, and the subject as a citizen, worker, and ethical singularity and requires a critical revisionism of these histories in the present. Greece is an interesting case in point; once represented as the cradle of European civilization, now the example of an economically rogue state in Europe, it showcases the economic, political and cultural dimensions of the crisis. The symbolic habitat of democracy, the polis and the citizen, now the site of their disintegration and default, Greece today comprises the key terrain for several epistemological, political, cultural and economic conflicts. As the sign that affiliates the imaginary space of the birth of democracy with the real political space where democracy is in a precarious condition the Greek case can gesture to the rethinking of the epistemological and political gap between the classical ideal of democracy and its modern reinvention as part of the capitalist, imperialist and colonialist mapping of the world that has led to the systematic expropriation and marginalization of non Western cultures within and outside the West.
This special issue of Synthesis invites essays that reconstellate the concepts of democracy, the polis and the subject in an age that witnesses the pressing call for democracy and justice manifested in the form of various collectivities, discourses and narratives that try to invent and articulate new visions of the political.