Being Greek and Albanian: The “No Man’s Land” of a Double Identity in the Balkans

 


Dr. Gazmend Kapllani, writer and newspaper columnist

 


Wednesday, November 9 at 4:15 p.m.
 Guido Goldman Room, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, 27 Kirkland St. at Cabot Way
 Cambridge MA.

 

Co-sponsored with the Southeastern Europe Study Group, Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

 

Dr. Gazmend Kapllani, a native of Albania, immigrated to Greece in 1991, where he has lived and worked since. In 2007, he completed his doctoral thesis on “The Quest of Otherness in Modernity, as Prerequisite for the Redefinition of the Self: Images of Greeks and Albanians in Greek and Albanian Press” at Panteion University, Athens. He is the author of My Name is Europe and A Short Border Handbook, the first two volumes of a planned trilogy dealing with issues of migration and identity, and writes a regular series for To Vima, one of Greece’s largest daily newspapers, that profiles Greeks whose lives have transversed borders and continents.Kapllani’s writing – which also includes book chapters, journal articles and poetry – reveals Greece’s growing social turmoil, a hornet’s nest of economic crisis, political disillusionment, and an influx of migrants and refugees from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As Kapka Kassabova writes in the Guardian, “Kapllani brings borders closer to home and ruffles our notions of 21st-century Europe and the price some pay to live in it.” By exploring deep-rooted preconceptions about movement and migration in Europe and beyond, Kapllani alerts his readers to the multiple borders – both physical and psychological – that divide today’s supposedly open and inter-connected world.