(DE) TOURING EUROPE The Balkan, the Postcolonial and Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe

Abstract

This article will interrogate the fictional mobilisation of ‘the Balkan’ as a trope in Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe. Reversing the conventions of European travel writing, the novel stages a shambolic Grand Tour of vampiric contamination, which exposes the vacuity of Europe’s self-professed ideals of progress, rationality and liberalism. Whilst bearing the imprint of a recognisable Balkanist rhetoric which locates the origins of racial prejudice in a Second World War Greek village and the excesses of conspicuous consumption in a contemporary Athens, Dead Europe also presents ‘the Balkan’ as a disruptive medium which jostles the Australian protagonist out of his political complacency and awakens him to his own visceral, if spectral, relation to prejudice. ‘The Balkan’ in this set-up does not function as a mere backdrop to identify against; rather, it is a site of a radical interrogation of the coherence, boundedness and erasures of the (Australian and European) self – an interrogation that confronts without offering a solution or redemption.

Keywords:

• Christos Tsiolkas
• Dead Europe
• Balkan
• postcolonial
• Europe
• spectre

Notes

1. Even though Greece is not always seen as part of ‘the imaginary Balkans’ because of its classical heritage, civilisational claims and British philhellenism, amongst other things (Hammond, 2007a: 1–21), most scholars include representations of Greece within the discourse of Balkanism (Fleming, 2000; Goldsworthy, 1998; Todorova, 1997). Since Tsiolkas’s imaginary Greece alludes to recognisable Balkanist tropes, the article will follow the approach of these latter writers.