The “Wretched of Europe”

This article focuses on narratives of the crisis in contemporary Greece and aims to understand the current context of austerity as a trope, symbolic signifier, and construct of inequality beyond austerity and in its manifestation as new social morphology in Europe. While the future recovery of Greece will require an extensive understanding of both economic and historical narratives which have sustained and fueled the Modern Greek state, a deeper analysis of structural and societal cultural codes mirrored in the public sphere is paramount in comprehending the cultural politics of inequalities in academic and public discourse. In a changing political and social environment, youth in Greece face the consequences of the debt crisis and, at the same time, reexamine their identity, values, and aspirations. Drawing from narrative, visual, and ethnographic data, this article explores stories of the crisis in grounding an account of inequality as narrated by those experiencing dispossession and austerity.