Books by Demetra Kasimis
Compare Homer's words "like some dishonored immigrant"; he who is excluded from the honors of the... more Compare Homer's words "like some dishonored immigrant"; he who is excluded from the honors of the city is like a metic. But when this exclusion is concealed, then its object is to deceive fellow inhabitants. 1
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, immigrants called 'metics' (metoikoi) settled in Athens wi... more In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, immigrants called 'metics' (metoikoi) settled in Athens without a path to citizenship. Galvanized by these political realities, classical thinkers cast a critical eye on the nativism defining democracy's membership rules and explored the city's anxieties over intermingling and passing. Yet readers continue to treat immigration and citizenship as separate phenomena of little interest to theorists writing at the time. In The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy, Demetra Kasimis makes visible the long-overlooked centrality of immigration to the originary practices of democracy and political theory in Athens. She dismantles the interpretive and political assumptions that have led readers to turn away from the metic and reveals the key role this figure plays in such texts as Plato's Republic. The result is a series of original readings that boldly reframes urgent questions about how democracies order their non-citizen members.
Papers by Demetra Kasimis
Theory & Event, 2025
What is the critical promise of reading for, listening for, and theorizing a Black patriotic form... more What is the critical promise of reading for, listening for, and theorizing a Black patriotic form? By the end of “I, Too, Sing America: Black Patriotism from Frederick Douglass to Whitney Houston,” the double-voiced and potentially subversive character of the performances Simon Stow examines seem obvious. Their apparent self-evidence raises the question of how and why their readings have, until now, been so straight. What enables the enlisting of these subversive performances in support of an assimilationist notion of patriotism? I will suggest here that they may be read not simply as subversive uses of a patriotic form but as expressing the duality inherent in patriotism itself.
Ramus, 2021
Please note that this pdf is for proof checking purposes only. It should not be distributed to th... more Please note that this pdf is for proof checking purposes only. It should not be distributed to third parties and may not represent the final published version.
This paper argues that the politics of immigration in classical Athens are a central and largely ... more This paper argues that the politics of immigration in classical Athens are a central and largely overlooked context for interpreting the period’s theories of citizenship. Through a close reading of the “metic� (resident foreigner) imagery in Euripides’ Ion, I animate this deeply resonant strain of critique in which theorists take aim at the democracy not simply for its erasure of
Contemporary Political Theory, 2016
American Journal of Political Science, 2021
Does the Republic depict a conspiracy? The ostensible impetus for discussing profound political c... more Does the Republic depict a conspiracy? The ostensible impetus for discussing profound political change behind closed doors is a desire to discuss the meaning of justice, not to replace a political order with a new one. But the dialogue takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when fears of plots sporadically consumed an eroding Athenian democracy. Arguments about political instability and instances of plotting reverberate throughout dialogue that takes shape in this suspicious climate. Whether Socrates makes us privy to a conversation about a political world that does not exist or presents us with a strategy for talking about revolution undetected remains unresolved. I argue that Athenian fears of secret power and revolution express themselves in the style and arguments of the Republic and suggest that already at the origins of democratic practice, critics like Plato were concerned with theorizing the subtleties of democratic erosion.
Review of Politics, 2020
This essay reads Euripides’ Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the ... more This essay reads Euripides’ Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text’s exploration of women’s subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as a phugas (12), the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt the phugas as a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea’s kin violence in a new light.
Humanities, 2019
This critical engagement with Elisabeth Yarbaksh's essay asks what Iran might be gaining from sus... more This critical engagement with Elisabeth Yarbaksh's essay asks what Iran might be gaining from sustaining its particular form of (un-)hospitality. It considers whether Iranian dynamics of hospitality might be working to meet the specific political interests of the post-revolutionary "republic" and concludes with a comparison to classical Athenian migration (metoikia) politics.
The Republic’s noble lie is widely read as an endorsement of political difference that opposes th... more The Republic’s noble lie is widely read as an endorsement of political difference that opposes the democratic ideals of its Athenian setting. Once the text’s exclusionary political realities and rhetorical structure are attended to, however, the passages no longer appear as the template for an essentialist politics or the act of political deception they are typically taken to be. What they do is lay bare the ‘artifice’ (mēchanē) by which regimes - including classical Athens - produce membership status as a ‘natural’ category. Plato makes an open secret of the regulatory fiction that one’s political ‘kind’ (genos) expresses a pre-given status. Given the privileged awareness he affords the reader, the noble lie can be fruitfully read as revealing - not concealing - that the ‘natural’ distinctions of an exclusionary citizenship politics are the effects of willful political power. This rhetorical strategy takes on specific significance in the context of the blood-based membership politics of Athens, which had its own noble lie. Accordingly, Plato’s text is shown to provoke insights into questions of democratic difference usually assumed beyond its purview. The Republic is read as exposing the workings of an essentialist politics that it is widely held to originate and prescribe.
This article explores the uses of Greek literature, philosophy, and politics in contemporary poli... more This article explores the uses of Greek literature, philosophy, and politics in contemporary political theory. It
explains that, since the second half of the 20th century, the study and deployment of Greek texts in political theory
has served four interrelated projects: (1) to underscore political theory’s roots as an embedded and politically
relevant practice; (2) to show that the history of political thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to
recover the spontaneity, plurality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and to offer new resources for
thinking about democratic equality and activity. The article suggests that the question of how to recuperate the
new political theoretical possibilities posed by a polyvocal or deconstructed Plato remains an underappreciated but
critical question for political and democratic theory today.
Classical Athens assimilated and disenfranchised a large, free immigrant population of “metics” o... more Classical Athens assimilated and disenfranchised a large, free immigrant population of “metics” on the basis of blood, generation after generation. Yet immigration politics remain a curiously displaced context for interpreting ancient Greek political thought and its instructive criticisms of democratic citizenship. Accordingly, Euripides’s Ion—the only classical text devoted to exploring the founding myth Athens used to naturalize metics’ exclusion from citizenship–is underexamined by political theorists. Attending to the play’s metic figurations and historical-poetic contexts, this essay argues that the Ion is a hitherto unappreciated immigration fable about the paradoxes of blood-based citizenship. Drawing ultimately on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it shows that the tragedy is a still-relevant political critique of the practices of concealment and disclosure—so dominant in today’s U.S. immigration rights debate—that make political status look prior to and generative of citizenship practice.
Book Reviews by Demetra Kasimis
Perspectives on Politics, 2019
right to be concerned that in Machiavelli's thought, elements of democratic politics coexist with... more right to be concerned that in Machiavelli's thought, elements of democratic politics coexist with elements of a proto-fascist politics (p. 103). Schmidt stays with this thought because it reveals that the deepest uncanny of democratic politics may be that "republics, too, who claim power from our democratic foundations, can ventriloquize the 'support' of their victims.. .. Machiavelli understands why the Medici chose to torture him to ventriloquize the pain of his torture and his exile; but he also insists in calling out that policy as a performance by a regime that is still vulnerable to the political acts of a free people" (p. 114). The best parts of Reading Politics with Machiavelli, in my opinion, occur when the author tries to identify these "political acts of a free people" even in the midst of today's profound corruption and decay of political life. Schmidt's call for a democratic form of conspiring at the start of the book receives a more concrete physiognomy toward the end, when the last words of a tortured Eric Garner at the hands of the New York Police Department become the protest chant "I can't breathe" of Black Lives Matter and are, in turn, picked up by Justice Sonia Sotomayor's objection to the U.S. Supreme Court majority decision on Utah v. Strieff that legitimates "unlawful police stops": "[N]o one can breathe in this atmosphere" (cited on p. 123). Schmidt's hope is that, like Machiavelli, we "will not remain privatized" and will "direct our eye toward stories that resist the ideologies of the opponents of republican politics" (p. 135).
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Books by Demetra Kasimis
Papers by Demetra Kasimis
explains that, since the second half of the 20th century, the study and deployment of Greek texts in political theory
has served four interrelated projects: (1) to underscore political theory’s roots as an embedded and politically
relevant practice; (2) to show that the history of political thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to
recover the spontaneity, plurality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and to offer new resources for
thinking about democratic equality and activity. The article suggests that the question of how to recuperate the
new political theoretical possibilities posed by a polyvocal or deconstructed Plato remains an underappreciated but
critical question for political and democratic theory today.
Book Reviews by Demetra Kasimis
explains that, since the second half of the 20th century, the study and deployment of Greek texts in political theory
has served four interrelated projects: (1) to underscore political theory’s roots as an embedded and politically
relevant practice; (2) to show that the history of political thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to
recover the spontaneity, plurality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and to offer new resources for
thinking about democratic equality and activity. The article suggests that the question of how to recuperate the
new political theoretical possibilities posed by a polyvocal or deconstructed Plato remains an underappreciated but
critical question for political and democratic theory today.