Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College English Honors Projects English Department 4-2020 Bodies in the Margins: Refiguring the Rebetika as Literature Sophia Schlesinger Macalester College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/english_honors Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Schlesinger, Sophia, "Bodies in the Margins: Refiguring the Rebetika as Literature" (2020). English Honors Projects. 44. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/english_honors/44 This Honors Project - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the English Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. BODIES IN THE MARGINS Refiguring the Rebetika as Literature Sophia Schlesinger Faculty Advisor: Andrea Kaston-Tange Macalester English Department Submitted April 25th, 2020 Abstract This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that includes Elaine Scarry, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Mark C.