ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on interpersonal relations between Greek characters and economic migrants both in Greece and across its borders in order to comment on the anxieties that underlie a reconfiguration of identity conditioned by the treatment of a multiculturalist difference in Greek society and through the Greek novel. The Greek novel has been charged with exploring the senses in which Balkan migrants will and will not become 'our own people'. An examination of the embodied experiences of affinity in matters of speech, cleanliness, bodily movement, health and language in the contemporary novel will inform the likelihood of a reappraisal of the scope of affinity between Greeks and others. The excavation of hybrid languages and previously hushed micro-histories is prevalent in a host of works of contemporary fiction, like Michel Fais's Autobiography of a Book (1994) or Markos Meskos's Muharrem (1999).
