This presentation is prompted by a copy of “Fititis” (from the LTU Greek archives), a Greek-Australian publication by a student Committee established in 1980 to overturn the decision of Monash University’s Dean of Arts to discontinue Modern Greek studies.
The seminar will trace the origins of this mobilization, framed by an analysis that aspires to understand the organised presence of Greek migrants in Australia beginning from the rather obvious yet often overlooked fact that the Greek-Australian communities are, and have been, an integral part of the social institution of Australian society from Federation.
This is not to insist merely that Australians of Greek origin have made significant economic, cultural or political contributions to social life, but to acknowledge that the study of our distinctive forms of collective organisation and the ways of living they have made possible have something important to tell us about Australian history and wider questions of national significance.
We will be exploring this idea through discussion of the emergence and subsequent influence of the 1960s political activism of Lambrakis Democratic Youth of Australia, its struggles for migrants’ equal rights, and resistance to the assignment by the dominant Anglo-Australian discourse of migrant communities as the perpetual-foreigners-within.
(*) Dr Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos are members of the Department of Politics Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University, where they teach modern European and Greek philosophy.
They have published books and articles on Hegel, Plato, Heidegger, Castoriadis, political theory, critical race and whiteness theory and the history of Greek-Australian political activism. Recent books include Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier (2014), The Disjunctive Logic of the World (2013), and (Un)Willing Collectives: on Castoriadis, Philosophy, and Politics (2018).
Dr Vassilakopoulos has also been working on the links between these thinkers and the history of Greek and Christian thought as well as on the role and nature of philosophical thinking in the 21st century. George also collaborates on research in the areas of critical race and whiteness theory and the history of Greek-Australian political activism, multiculturalism and foreigner discourses
They joined the Greek Democritus Workers League in 1980.
