24WQEurovisionGreece

  Debrief In 2018, Eurovision was held in Lisbon, Portugal with the theme, “All Aboard!” Yianna Terzi, born and raised in Greece, was selected to represent her country after boasting a successful musical career in Athens and Los Angeles. Her song, “Oniro Mou,” harbored much commercial success prior to the competition, but unfortunately did not qualify for the final after placing fourteenth in the semifinals. The lyrics, staging, and political context of this performance provide an interesting look into how Greece wants to represent itself internationally. My previous blog post addresses the complicated definition of what it means to be Greek, which I argued to include language, history, and perceived ethnicity. In this post, I will be analyzing Greece’s 2018 Eurovision performance to explore the ways in which this performance aligns with the Greek identity. Musical Style “Oniro Mou” is a somber, but hopeful sounding piece that incorporates traditional Greek musical elements...

     Greek National Identity What is National Identity? National identity is the sense of membership and belonging to an imagined cohesive nation, expressed by adopting and supporting the distinctive beliefs, values, and cultural traditions associated with it. Nations are not an objective entity, but rather a collection of people who feel an inherent connection to one another based on their location within the established territorial boundaries, as well as commonalities surrounding culture and social norms. The distinctive factors that define a nation can include language, religion, ethnicity, shared myths and heroes, or economic system such as the type of currency. Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities" offers a definition of a nation as an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 3). I argue that, although a national community is imagined in the sense that you will never personally know the rest of the memb...