Acknowledgments

This is a book about the figure of the immigrant. It is also a book about the routes we have taken to discount its vitality in classical Greek thought and the new ones we might now travel to engage it. It is in two senses, then, a book about genealogy. In the first sense, it is a book about the descent criterion Athenians used to deny democratic citizenship to resident foreigners (metoikoi) and their children and the ways that some Athenian thinkers critically explored the meanings of this nativist rule. In the second, it is a book about the origins of two practices, political theory and democratic citizenship, and the ways that our views about these quintessentially Athenian activities have been shaped in part by displacing the metic (metoikos) from the center of ancient democratic life and thought.

Metoikos is a word from my childhood. Yet as any speaker of Modern Greek will tell you, it is not the usual term for immigrant. How I came to care deeply about this figure does not always seem as deliberate as the years I have spent writing about it. I have come to see my relation to the metic as a sign of the winding paths that ideas (about the past) take and a gentle reminder to embrace one’s useful prejudice, the term Gadamer coined to suggest that a reader’s situatedness does not so much close down as open up one’s understanding of a text.

In 1971, in the middle of Greece’s military dictatorship, the singer Giorgos Dalaras recorded a version of “Le Métèque,” a song Georges Moustaki had released a few years earlier in French. Although he kept the music the same, Dalaras used Greek lyrics that the poet and antiwar activist Dimitris Christodoulou had written under conditions of censorship. The Greek rendition recast Moustaki’s ballad about a wandering Greek Jew as the nebulous story of a life derailed by sudden and forced mobility. The terms evoked but left unspoken the fate of Greece’s political exiles. Within four years of the song’s release, my father had left Greece. A decade later, we danced on the wood floor of our New York apartment to his Greek records. Among them was O Metoikos.

I owe this book to the zigzagging routes that the metoikos took to reach me – from Ancient Greek to French to Modern Greek and back again. In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche wrote that it was only to the extent that he had been a pupil of earlier times, especially the Hellenic, that though a child of the present, he was able to see the urgency of thinking critically and diagnostically about the relations we construct to the past and the matters we strategically leave out of these visions. I tend to think it was only because I was a child of a Hellenic present that, though a student of earlier times, the figure of the metic spoke to me years later in a classroom and I stopped to imagine its critical promise. I offer this anecdote about the reception of ideas in celebration of the different and unsung ways we come to classical Greece. Most of all, I offer it as a testament to my father’s unyielding spirit and in gratitude for the energy and love with which he taught me his language.

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I have many people to thank for their engagement with the ideas in this book. Let me begin with my teachers. This project started as a dissertation in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. I thank S. Sara Monoson, Bonnie Honig, and Mary G. Dietz for encouraging me to take risks, holding me to exacting standards, and exhibiting an unwavering commitment to the merits of the argument. The intellectual ambitions of the present study would have been unthinkable without Sara’s shrewd advice that I engage deeply with the discipline of classics while training as a political theorist. Not a week goes by that I do not appreciate the emphasis on critique that characterized the political theory program at Northwestern. I am also thankful to former and current Northwestern faculty for opening my eyes in the classroom: Tad Brennan, Michael Hanchard, Marianne Hopman, Richard Kraut, the late Ernesto Laclau, Michael Loriaux, Lyle Massey, and Linda Zerilli. The undergraduate professors I had in philosophy, comparative literature, and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University – Valentina Izmirlieva, Bonnie Kent, Marina Kotzamani, Neni Panourgia, Wolfgang Mann, Karen Van Dyck, and Nadia Urbinati – have implicitly shaped the interdisciplinary style of this work. I also wish to thank Claude Catapano, Geraldine Woods, and Tom LaFarge, my wonderful high school teachers at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, for first showing me how to read history and literature critically, ambitiously, and with conviction.

My colleagues in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago have been extremely generous with their time and incisive in their readings of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to Adom Getachew, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Jennifer Pitts, Lisa Wedeen, and Linda Zerilli for giving me comments on chapters and cheering me on with verve. The final throes of writing were eased by the kindness of four people who sat down to read the entire manuscript: I thank Karuna Mantena for seeing connections among chapters and, most happily, for telling me I was done; Nancy Worman for noticing where I was selling my claims short and meeting me up and down MacDougal Street to talk about it; Lisa Wedeen for providing page-by-page notes and sharpening the book’s vision; and Mary G. Dietz for reading with characteristic depth, dedication, and wit – the marks of our conversations about hermeneutics and political theory are all over this book. For many years, my dear friend Ella Myers has read drafts of my work with a razor-sharp critical eye and the lively, loving voice of encouragement only she possesses. Christopher Skeaff has also discussed this manuscript with subtlety and perspicacity since graduate school. To Samuel Chambers, I owe a large measure of thanks not only for his feedback but also for the wise counsel he provides with a rare kindness.

For their helpful thoughts on the book at different stages and in various forms, I warmly thank Clifford Ando, Larissa Atkison, Ryan Balot, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Mark Bauer, Susan Bickford, Andrés Fabian Henao Castro, Chiara Cordelli, Giuseppe Cumella, Joshua Dienstag, Lisa Disch, Linda Edelstein, Jay Elliott, Michaele Ferguson, Jill Frank, Bryan Garsten, Larry George, James Glisson, Ayten Gündoğdu, Emily Greenwood, Verity Harte, Elizabeth Irwin, Patrick Jagoda, Heather Keenleyside, Zoë Kontes, Rachel Kravetz, Michèle Lowrie, Matthew Landauer, Hélène Landemore, Melissa Lane, Robyn Marasco, Andrew March, James Martel, Jake Matatyaou, Lida Maxwell, Kirstie McClure, Sara Monoson, Sankar Mutthu, Sarah Nooter, Paul North, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Mark Payne, Maggie Penn, Tracey Rosen, Michael Rossi, Arlene Saxonhouse, Kristen Schilt, Joel Schlosser, Kathryn Slanski, Agatha Slupek, Adam Sonderberg, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Simon Stow, Nathan Tarcov, Chris Trinacty, Joan Tronto, and John Wallach. I am grateful to Claudio Sansone and Agatha Slupek for their helpful research assistance; Madeleine Johnson and Rona Johnston Gordon for their work preparing the final manuscript; and Pam Scholefield for her quick and careful indexing. Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 4 were published, respectively, as “The Tragedy of Blood-Based Membership: Secrecy and the Politics of Immigration in Euripides’ Ion” in Political Theory 41/2 (April 2013): 231–256 and “Plato’s Open Secret,” Contemporary Political Theory 15/4 (November 2016): 339–357.

For their tough questions and thoughtful remarks, I thank audiences at Columbia, CUNY, Georgetown, Kenyon, King’s College London, Northwestern, Princeton, the Remarque Institute (NYU) Kandersteg Seminar, UCLA, UNC–Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago, the University of South Carolina, the University of Toronto, and Yale. I am particularly indebted to the interdisciplinary group of humanists and social scientists at UC Irvine for encouraging me to own the metic’s difference from the immigrant. On many occasions, political theorists at the annual conventions of the American Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, and the Association for Political Theory have been a source of steady support and friendly criticism.

I am also deeply appreciative to several institutions for funding my writing over the years. My first thanks go to the Alumnae Association of Northwestern University, which awarded me a dissertation fellowship when I began writing. The American Council for Learned Societies gave me a Mellon Early Career Award that supported my last year of dissertating. During book revisions, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a fellowship that supported the research and composition of several new chapters and changed my life. I thank the faculty and administrators at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale for providing me with a postdoctoral position after graduate school and welcoming me back two years later to carry out the NEH: Mark Bauer, Bryan Garsten, Emily Greenwood, the late Maria Rosa Menocal, Norma Thompson, and Gary Tomlinson. Between my two stays in New Haven, the Political Science Department at California State, Long Beach, gave me my first faculty position and showed me what collegiality and politically engaged teaching mean. I am indebted to my former colleagues at CSULB, in particular Larry George, Terri Wright, Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Cora Goldstein, and Kevin Wallsten, for their belief in this project.

It has not been easy to reach across disciplinary lines, and I thank my editors at Cambridge University Press for their early and sustained interest in helping me do so. Emily Greenwood has been a steadfast advocate of this book and, in her capacity as a series editor, helped on numerous occasions to strengthen it. I am also grateful to Michael Sharp, Alastair Blanshard, and Shane Butler for guiding the manuscript through the publication process. For his advice at a crucial moment, I thank Robert Dreesen.

My extended family in Corinth and Athens has provided the nourishing conditions for my writing nearly every summer and sometimes for months at a time. I thank my grandmother Dimitra Kasimis, my aunt Sofia, my cousin Chryssa, and in particular, my uncle Charalambos for their humor, affection, and support. In New York, my late maternal grandparents Harry and Gussie Pulin and my late uncle Chuck showed me that there is grace in craft, power in artistry, and mischief in language. I hope that they would have recognized their imprint on this book. I am, as always, deeply appreciative of my oldest friends Adi Segal, Jonathan Ferrantelli, Anya Sawyer, and Carmina Ocampo. Their abiding interest in my work is fortunately surpassed by their excitement to talk about everything else.

This book is dedicated to my brother Nicholas Kasimis, a fierce and loving champion of all my efforts, and to my parents, Janet and Petros, the bravest and most creative people I know. For showing me the pleasure of finding meaning in (nearly!) everything, I especially thank my mother, whose analytic mind is matched in strength only by the intensity of her affection for us all. Philip Baker’s brilliant imagination, warmth, playfulness, and love have sustained me throughout the writing of this book. I cannot believe the attention and insight with which he has read every line, but I am certain that he deserves all the credit in the world for reminding me to make this manuscript my very own.