Dangerous Citizens Wins the Edmund Keeley Book Prize
By FUPress
18th October 2011
The winner of the 2009-2010 competition is Neni Panourgiá for Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State, Fordham University Press.
The Edmund Keeley Book Prize is awarded to an academic book dealing with modern Greece or a Hellenic theme published originally in the English language.
For more information click here.
“Dangerous Citizens is a simultaneous indictment of the “liberal” nation-state’s blithe pretensions and willful self-ignorance; of the political and discursive relegation of modern Greek history to the historical margins of the colonial “civilizing mission”; and of inhuman simplifications of the past everywhere. In an evocation of Oedipus that owes nothing to crass invocations of continuity with the ancient world, Neni Panourgiá writes with the ethical passion of a partial witness who nonetheless claims no special privilege other than that of the common humanity denied by the state to those it repeatedly configures as its enemies. In posing this appealingly controversial challenge to the liberal self-imagination, moreover, Panourgiá–who has honed her distinctive writing idiom into a compelling mix of careful scholarship and stylistic adventurism–calls anthropology itself to account.”–Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
“Dangerous Citizens is a powerful and unforgettable book. It is at once a horrific history of nearly a century of state violence in Greece that few people may be aware of; a profound meditation on the conditions of possibility for both the idea and the reality of concentration camps; and a text that intertwines ethnography, history, and personal memoir to very powerful effect.”–Sherry Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles
Dangerous Citizens also won Honorable Mention for the 2009 Prose Awards in Archeology & Anthropology.
To read more about Neni Panourgiá and Dangerous Citizens: Click here.