| FB-57676-14 | Research Programs: Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Demetra Fannie Kasimis | Classical Greek Theory and the Politics of Immigration | 8/1/2014 - 7/31/2015 | $50,400.00 | Demetra | Fannie | Kasimis | | | | CSU, Long Beach | Long Beach | CA | 90840-0004 | USA | 2013 | Political Theory | Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
This book argues that the politics of immigration are a central--but curiously displaced--matter of investigation in the "canon" of classical Greek thought. It is the first study to treat the immigrant in classical democracy as an object of philosophical and political inquiry, rather than simply a historical fact about Athens. By tracking figurations of the immigrant, or "metic," in classical thought, the book animates an unappreciated strain of critique aimed at the democracy's use of nativism. Through the metic, I argue, classical thinkers explore the democracy's strategies of exclusion and suggest that descent-based citizenship, from which metics were excluded, encourages a society of passive, litigious citizens preoccupied with discerning and verifying legal status. The book asks why and to what effects the metic has been displaced from the center of classical Greek thought and brings its new readings of the ancients to bear on the contemporary politics of immigration. |