Afterword: Ghosting, Imagery, and Reconstruction: Or, What We Do Not Talk About When We Do Not Talk About Class in Greece

In this afterword, I return to the discussion about social class in Greece, or, rather, its relevant absence. I use the close reading of a key scene from the film Attenberg directed by Athina Rachel Tsangaris (2010), in order to argue that what popular views about social class in Greece share with earlier scholarly debates is their tendency to see class as (a) a revenant, a ghostly presence; (b) as a top-down process of description and identification, instead of an intersectional and dynamic phenomenon; and (c) as a social category eventually washed over by national allegory. In the last part of the afterword I review the benefits of the methodological turn proposed by this volume, what the editors describe as an analysis of the “class-media interplay”. Such a turn is crucially more alert to novel articulations of power, social hierarchy, hegemony and belonging, while also allowing us to trace new histories and archives of social class in Greece.