Stage of Emergency

Gonda Van Steen is Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida.

• Acknowledgements ; List of Figures ; A Note on Translations and Transliterations ; Introduction ; 1. The Theater-historical Context and the Turn to New Greek Theater ; 2. "These Bonds of Freedom Hurt": The Logos and Silence of Censorship and Self-censorship ; 3. Monopolizing National History: Performing Tyranny and Constructing Myths ; 4. Individual Responsibility before Tyranny as the Capitalist Enemy ; Conclusion ; References ; Index

To sum up, Gonda Van Steen's book restages the history of New Greek Theatre by conducting a "cultural history of the dictatorship" (p. 304). Her work is valuable not only because it traces out a legacy of practices and thematic and aesthetic mechanisms that constitute the theatre of the last quarter of the twentieth century as she asserts in the last paragraph of her book. It is also valuable because, as I suggest above, the impact and legacy of this cultural production might be detected in other arts like cinema. Finally, it is also politically valuable since it provides proof for a moment in history when an art form had the dynamic and the momentum to shape social consciousness, to promote democratic solutions, to be a transformative power. In that sense, the book also stands as an excavation of our contemporary political imaginary.