Diogenes 5 (2016): 13-29 ISSN 2054-6696 13 Between the Local, the Global, and the Political: Local Poetics and Social Activism in Yiannēs Makridakēs’s Work Vassiliki Kaisidou PhD Candidate Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham Abstract Following on from the recent topographical shift in Greek fiction, from the metropolitan centres to the Greek periphery, this paper is concerned with the literary output of a contemporary writer, Yiannēs Makridakēs, who par excellence engages with this particularising tendency. Since Makridakēs’s ‘local poetics’ have been thus far interpreted as a return to literary tradition (ithografia), this paper shifts the focus of attention to the ways in which the local character of his narratives gestures to global phenomena and their reverberations in the national sphere of Greece. Drawing on sociological theories of glocalisation (Robert Robertson, Arjun Appadurai), I aim to illustrate that the writer (re)negotiates locality through its interconnectedness with national and international historical reality, as a part of a political agenda of social activism. Makridakēs’s writing approach raises important implications for the relevance of locality in a globalised world alongside the use of literature as a political manifesto of sorts, especially in times of severe socio-economic crises. After the transition to democracy (known as metapolitefsi), in 1974, Greek fiction has seen seminal widespread ideological and aesthetic changes; namely, it exhibited a ‘centrifugal turn’, for the authors started setting their plots outside Greece, engaging with the notions of mobility, displacement, and cosmopolitanism as a response to the challenges of European integration. 1 Nevertheless, over the last few years, especially since the outburst of the financial crisis in 2008, literary critics have traced a spatial shift from the metropolitan centres to the 1 Dimitris Tziovas, “Centrifugal Topographies, Cultural Allegories and Metafictional Strategies in Greek Fiction since 1974”, in From Local History to the Global Individual Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe, ed. by P. Mackridge and E. Yannakakis, (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2004), 24-26.