Description
Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora explores the legacy of the Great Catastrophe—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. The book draws extensively on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island of Lesvos in particular) and in the Greater Boston area, as well as on the author’s lifetime immersion in the North American Greek diaspora. Through analysis of handwritten music manuscripts, homemade audio recordings, and contemporary live performances, the book traces the routes of repertoire and style over generations and back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, investigating the ways that the particular musical traditions of the Anatolian Greek community have contributed to their understanding of their place in the global Greek diaspora and the wider post-Ottoman world. Alternating between fine-grained musicological analysis and engaging narrative prose, it fills a lacuna in scholarship on the transnational Greek experience.
About the Author
Panayotis F. League is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University.
Praise For…
"League has written a book that all lovers of Anatolian Greek music should be grateful for. He is a an excellent storyteller, and combines that skill with a thorough knowledge of the music he writes about and the people who perform it. He demonstrates the power of music to recreate an otherwise inaccessible past, enabling Anatolian Greeks to imaginatively engage with their ancestors and the lost intercommunal world of late Ottoman society."
—Journal of Modern Greek Studies,
— Gail Holst-Warhaft
Awarded Society for American Music (SAM) H. Earle Johnson Book Publication Subvention
— SAH H. Earle Johnson Book Publication Subvention
"Rarely does there emerge an ethnographer whose description and analysis strike so close to the beating heart of the topic that readers palpably experience its beauty and pain. Panayotis League is such a writer. In Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, League explores the ways that musical traditions from the island of Lesvos have reflected and mediated shifting identities both in Lesvos and in its diaspora. In the process, he touches upon the essence of diaspora—to be exiled from what is perceived as home and thus impelled to constantly re-create it."
—Journal of American Folklore
— Tina Bucuvalas