Bøger af Adrianne Kalfopoulou

The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation state. Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014 Italy and the United Kingdom ended funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens' neighborhoods. A once abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in "The Parts Don’t Add Up" a visual essay, "Embedded in the word refugee is refuge," suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.

"On the Gaze: Dubai and Its New Cosmopolitanisms engages with the spectacular growth of the city of Dubai, a once small but busy Arabian Gulf town known for its pearl divers and fishing trade. Author Adrianne Kalfopoulou follows the changes of the town, an informal British Protectorate, like the cluster of coastal sheikhdoms that included Oman and Abu Dhabi, known as the Trucial States for the protective treaties signed with the United Kingdom, Dubai became one of the seven Arab states which formed the UAE (United Arab Emirates) in 1971. The Gulf town of the 1950s expanded notably during the reign of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (1968-1990), whose foresightedness and risk-taking acuity were seminal in securing key infrastructure projects such as the expansion of the Dubai Creek harbor and the Jebel Ali port that transformed the town into a regional trade hub, building the foundation for today's commercial attractions as much as the optics of its spectacular skyline of architectural wonders. Uniquely, today's nexus of twenty-first century cosmopolitanisms caters to all manner of the gaze"--

The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou’s Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural—and personal—crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented ‘I’ charted in these essays—all are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.

¿It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopouloüs poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.¿ ¿T. Alan Broughton

These are poems born of facets and interrogations of citizenship and national dissolution in the Greek cultural landscape of economic austerity, of the self in love, too, with topoi imbued with history, eros, and loss. The terrains are multiple and transient, the subjects both quotidian and extraordinary in their lyric consciousness of time.