«Ci avete ingannato con il vostro Zorba e intontito con il vostro sirtaki». Il sé esotico nelle prime opere di Antonis Surunis e Theodor Kallifatides

Antonis Surunis (1942-2016) and Theodor Kallifatides (1938) are two authors of Greek origin who migrated respectively to Germany and Sweden during the ’60s. In their earliest prose fiction works, the narration of encounters between Greeks and westerns offers the ground for a representation of Greek national identity that, in both authors, is based primarily on masculinity and on the propensity to betrayal. The paper traces the roots of this representation back to the colonial stereotypes of Greeks elaborated in Europe during the 19th Century, and argues that Sourounis seems to have assimilated them, whereas Kallifatides critically uses them to reproduce a strategic “anthropological exotic” (Huggan) and to carry out a postcolonial discourse.