A Dialogue on Decolonizing Greece's Feminist's Movement, Public Space, and Memory

This article refers to Greece, which geographically is located in Europe, shares borders with Asiaand is part of the Balkan Peninsula; it. takes the form of a dialogue between two scholars whoseresearch intersects at the crossroads of feminist cultural production and decolonial theory.Drawing on Herzfeld’s concept of the crypto-colony, it examines how Greece’s doublecolonization—through Western European modernity and hegemonic nationalist Hellenism—hasstructured the conditions of women’s political agency and the archival regimes through whichthat agency has been rendered visible or suppressed. The discussion moves across three registers:historical, tracing women’s embodied political praxis from the 1940s Resistance against the AxisOccupation until the first decades of the 21th century; analyzing how feminist collectives—mostnotably the radical shadow theater group Karagiozaina (Athens, 1980–1989)—transformedvernacular cultural forms and working-class public space into sites of decolonial intervention;the article argues that decolonial archives function simultaneously as affective, spatial, andpolitical practices, and that memory, reactivated against crypto-colonial temporality, remains amethodology for forging subversive democratic futures.