ABSTRACT
The staging of this event, i.e. the dromeno, may serve, I suggest, as a metaphor for the staging of difference in contemporary Greece as a European locality. In reading this performance I argue that the landscape indeed appears diverse now, yet the project of making the Other visible may de-historicize the Other, as a trade-off for his/her visibility. In other words, the attempt to relieve references to minority groups from religious designations (e.g. 'Muslim'), in order to identify them as different ethnic subjects ('Turkish', 'Pomak', 'Roma') within a nation-state, may produce another attachment to new essentialist constructions of the Other. In arguing this I wish to avoid pursuing an approach that reduces the project of multiculturalism to existing power structures, hence circumventing this project as a reaffirmation of hegemony. Rather, I attempt to make visible what I perceive as ambivalences of power in such processes, and to contextualize this event as a re-signification process, which is contingent on emerging European realities.
