APPROACHING USE BY DATE

 

The protagonist is a senior marketing manager for clothing for a large commercial entity and this, apparently, for Woolworths makes her an expert on Greek Orthodox culture. The occasion is the company’s Easter promotional catalogue, a seasonal lift-out in which recipes and imagery are assembled to evoke a version of cultural celebration. The lift out checks all the required boxes of diversity, yet the culture it purports to honour is treated as vestige rather than presence, something relegated to the yiayia, who appears to be the only figure capable of plausibly observing the Lenten fast.

The rest of us hover somewhere between costume and consumption. We are wheeled out in calibrated doses, our icons flattened into patterns, our rituals translated into textures that can be folded, discounted, and cleared from racks by season’s end. Greek Orthodoxy is rendered as aesthetic rather than ontology, a palette of Pascal reds and golds suggestive of incense yet never permitting a discussion of its deeper meaning. Here, the fasting body is replaced by the curated body, sustained by visibility rather than abstinence.

Within this frame, Lent is reduced to a narrative device, a gesture towards gravity in a spread otherwise indistinguishable from any other. The yiayia is invoked as a guarantor of authenticity, her hands dusted with flour, her faith rendered immutable precisely because it is never taken seriously enough to threaten the dominant narrative. She is safely contained, her world bounded by the kitchen and her beliefs preserved through distance and exhibition rather than via engagement.

It is no incidental detail that the entire tableau in the promotional material is inhabited exclusively by women. Yiayia presides with serene, unselfconscious authority, a younger woman remains close at hand in practised assistance, while a child is ushered into the small disciplines of repetition. No male presence disturbs this pre-arrangement. Their absence of course, is not in any way neutral. Evidently, the ethnic Greek-Australian household of 2026 is imagined as a feminised space, sustained by women and confined to them, while men, (and with them long established stereotypes about the positioning and function of authority, intellect, and public agency), are displaced beyond the frame. The scene resolves into a decontextualised household, set apart from the social world in which it actually exists, and made to stand as representative of the culture as a whole. In that isolation, no structures of thought, leadership, or participation in the public sphere are permitted to appear, not because they are absent, but because they fall outside the terms of representation.

Accordingly, the ethnic woman, even as her ‘professional’ credentials are noted, is situated within a frame that permits no development. The domestic sphere is not simply her setting. It becomes her horizon. Authority remains bounded by the kitchen and its matriarchs, while identity is aligned with continuity, care, and inherited custom that is never subjected to change. The ethnic woman, of all generations is held at a single point in time, required to stand in for a past that must be preserved rather than reworked. Culture, in turn, is rendered static, its capacity for evolution set aside in favour of recognisable repetition.

Feminist and postcolonial scholarship has long observed this manoeuvre. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has shown, the non-Western woman is repeatedly produced as a stable figure, bound to tradition and stripped of internal differentiation, while Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identifies the manner in which such figures are spoken for within dominant discourses, appearing only in forms that confirm their subordination. The tableau in the promotional material conforms to this logic, with representation not merely depicting but actively constructing a narrative in which certain features are selected as legible, others excluded as irrelevant, producing a version of culture that can be recognised only in its most domesticated form.

Significantly, the effect is not produced by marketers alone. It is sustained by the participation of those being represented. Ethnic subjects often step into these roles willingly, often with a sense of pride, because the invitation is received as recognition rather than as framing. There is no need to question the good faith of the participants or the genuineness of their intentions. The form it takes, however, is decidedly not neutral, aligning instead with expectations of the dominant class already in place, in which ethnic culture appears in domesticated, familiar, and non-disruptive terms. The alignment of these participants is rarely conscious, reflecting instead something more deeply absorbed. Having been born and raised within an Anglophone order, ethnic communities internalise what will be accepted and what will not, and adjust accordingly. Expression is moderated, elements that might appear excessive or unintelligible are set aside, and culture is presented in a form that will be received the most palatably, without friction. Rather than presenting itself as constraint, it passes as appropriateness, as the natural way in which such a culture should comport itself in public.

In the process, the authority to interpret culture is displaced, so that meaning, rather than being generated within practice, becomes performance, assigned according to what can be recognised from outside it. Consequently, internal variation is flattened, with differences of region, class, theology, and practice collapsing into a single intelligible form. Crucially however, what is being reproduced are limits that have not been set by those who inhabit the culture itself. As George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou has argued, the migrant remains positioned as an eternal stranger and a subversive. Mainstream acceptance is extended within bounds and conditions, and it is often through these acts of accommodation that those bounds are preserved.

The promotional insert makes much of the yiayia’s cookbook, lovingly annotated and translated into English, as though the very act of translation were one of cultural rescue. To those of us inhabiting the culture, her barely literate scrawl and misspelled words are highly emotive and relatable, causing us to identify with her immediately. In the process, we run the risk of forgetting that Greek in this curated sphere, is permitted its afterlife only in glossaries and explanatory brackets, tolerated as opacity that must be clarified rather than inhabited. It is assumed to belong to those who arrived bearing it, carried across borders and relinquished upon settlement. The possibility that it persists, that it remains a living medium of thought among those born here, or indeed that it has a future is dismissed, or in the best case, left unconsidered.

There is a reason for this. Greek must remain confined to the first generation because its continuation unsettles the terms on which multiculturalism is extended. The presence of a living, transmitted language introduces into an Anglophone order a parallel system of meaning that does not require translation and a mode of thought that exceeds the linguistic monopoly through which that order understands itself. In this sense, Greek is not merely different. It is subversive, with evidence of its persistence suggesting that assimilation is neither complete nor inevitable, that another linguistic and cultural continuity can endure without yielding to the dominant one. Such continuity cannot be openly rejected, yet neither can it be encouraged. It is instead contained. Languages that do not circulate within the dominant economy are recoded as sentimental rather than functional, their value located in nostalgia. Within this framework, multiculturalism operates as toleration with an endpoint. Expression is permitted so long as it signals transition. Continuity beyond the migrant generation disrupts that expectation and is therefore recast as excess, as a failure to integrate. The language is accepted only on condition that it is in the process of disappearing.

Thus the Lenten fast, with all its discipline and defiance, becomes unintelligible within the frame that seeks to display it. It lingers on the margins of glossy pages, untranslated and therefore unthreatening, waiting patiently for a world that no longer expects to be changed by it. But by all means believe them when they tell you that the twists of the koulourakia, described helpfully as braided shapes, signify eternity. Of such explanations are myths sustained, and of such myths, cultures elegantly concluded.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 11 April 2026