Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the 'vibrations' at the intersection between the politics and cultures of the Left in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus since the Sixties. It aims to disclose those moments in which the Left has been claimed and performed, through political manifestos and speeches, and through corporeal acts, discursive practices and affective encounters. In the decades that followed the Sixties, performing memory became one of the distinctive cultures of the Left, paving the way for both conflict and rapprochement among diverse left-wing subjects. The book analyses the making/remaking/unmaking of local and national 'traditions', which left-wing subjects did not construe as mutually exclusive with discourses on desirable 'modernities'. It addresses the diverse, multidirectional transnational flows among Greek, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot left-wingers: of people, ideas and cultural patterns. The book explores, left-wingers in the settings in question reconfigured their understandings of 'tradition' and 'modernity'.