Zone of Passions: a Queer Re-imagining of Cyprus’s “No Man’s Land”

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Published: Apr 12, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16244
Keywords:
Cyprus Dead Zone postcolonialism queer literature Niki Marangou Lysandros Pytharas Alicia Stallings
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni
European University Cyprus
Abstract

Focusing on a selection of literary and critical texts, this article explores the Dead Zone as a space that is decidedly queer in its undecidability, unspeakability, and resistance to normalisation; a landscape where desire, apprehension, and memory play themselves out. Rereading this zone as queer space allows us imaginings of Cyprus beyond the normalising regimes of the island’s north and south. And, such re-reading also invites a reconceptualisation of the Dead Zone as a profoundly ambiguous geographical site, political space, and imaginary topos.

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Author Biography
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, European University Cyprus
Stavros S. Karayanni is Associate Professor of English at the European University Cyprus. He is the author of Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2004, reprinted 2005, 2006, 2010), co-author of Sexual Interactions; The Social Construction of Atypical Sexual Behaviors (Boca Raton, 2006), and co-editor of Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination (Brill, 2015). Since 2007, he is the managing editor of the multilingual journal Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus. 
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