Your nostalgia has created

A nonexistent country, with laws

Alien to earth and man.

George Seferis, The Return of the Exile (Keeley and Sherrard, 1981, pp. 224-25)

The history of Greece's first century as an independent nation-state is in many ways a history of the interplay among urban space, nationalism, and identity. It is also a history of nostalgia: Western European nostalgia for one specific past, Greek nostalgia for another, and the tension between the two.

Women figure centrally in representations of modernity and of nations. This has caught the attention of researchers both in the West and in the context of “Third World” nationalisms. Yuval-Davis states: ”[I]t is women –not just (?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia—who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically” (1997, p. 2). However, an analysis of “women” as the subjects of the nation differs from a perspective that dwells on the representations of women produced by a (mostly) male elite. Jordanova argues that the Enlightenment in the West was a set of mental and practical activities of the male elite “who gained influence because of their ideas and ‘knowledge’” (1995, p. 64), and whose concern was “to establish the validity of their vision of the world” (p. 64). She shows convincingly that these activities were “sexual” in nature.

The category of “woman” has historically been used not only to locate but also to regulate women. Women's magazines were and are part of that process, as Beetham maintains: “[T]hey not only defined readers as ‘women,’ they sought to bring into being the women they addressed” (Beetham 1996, p. ix). Since femininity is always represented as something to be achieved in women's magazines, they provide a context through which women learn their gender roles in the process of becoming feminine. The notion of femininity is not fixed and stable; on the contrary, definitions are continually changing, as evidenced by the consumer discourses that redefined femininity in almost every decade of the twentieth century. These various representations of femininity are ultimately related to the politics of identity. Magazines are, therefore, significant sources in circulating collective meanings, recognizing diverse female subjectivities, and constructing sexual differences.

In this study I propose to outline the political history of Cezayir-i Garp, the Ottoman province of Algeria, during the seventeenth century, while at the same time noting the correspondence between this history and the various developments at the center of the Ottoman Empire as well as in some of the provinces. This similarity suggests that Ottoman rule in Algeria was influenced by the same factors that affected the rest of the Empire. The pattern of development of the province's Ottoman elite, and the nature of this elite's behavior, reinforce its position within the imperial framework, even in periods when it was considered to be on a divergent path. My argument is that the history of the Ottoman province of Algeria was an integral part of an imperial pattern and structure forged by complex and dynamic relations between the imperial capital and its provinces.

A common error in historico-political analysis consists in an inability to find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural. This leads to presenting causes as immediately operative which in fact only operate indirectly, or to asserting that the immediate causes are the only effective ones … In the first case there is an overestimation of mechanical causes, in the second an exaggeration of the voluntarist and individual element (Gramsci 1971, p. 178).

The past to which a society refers in search of clues for self-identification and confirmation for its hopes and aspirations is not an objective reality. It is a myth that can be defined as “a (preferably narrative) reference to the past in order to shed light from there on present and future” (Assmann 1997, p. 78). However, the function of myth is not generally to legitimize the present order or to continue it into the future. It may also work as a counter-principle of the present, contrasting it with a better past and betraying the experience of a fundamental deficiency in present society. Assmann thus distinguishes several functions of the myth collectively termed mythomotoric: It can either serve the present (präsentisch, fundierend) or criticize it (kontrapräsentisch, in its extreme forms revolutionary) (Assmann 1997, pp. 80-86).