Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou
to confront influential scholarly trends in sociology and race studies that represent European ethnicities in terms of dissolution, closure, and disposability.17 My aim is to survey the complexity of Greek America and to select for analysis those texts that make accessible a set of meanings not otherwise available in dominant academic narratives about white ethnicities. While I do not shy away from interrogating dominant white ethnic narratives for their complicity in generating ahistorical accounts of diversity, I also showcase those usable pasts that challenge hegemonic interpretations in the sociology of ethnicity. In this respect, my work raises broad interpretive questions and redraws the conceptual boundaries in the study of white ethnicities. For instance, whereas scholars who privilege race as an analytical category project the weakening of collective ethnic identities, I illuminate usable pasts constructed to forge enduring group commitments. In addition, if symbolic ethnicity privileges choice in the making of ethnic identities, I demonstrate the importance of social discourses and history in determining identities. In my analysis, white ethnicity emerges as a heterogeneous social field constituted by agency and cultural determination, ambivalence and certainty, open-endedness and closure, private creativity and collective belonging—an uneven field marked by contested cultural boundaries and defined by alternative social meanings.
The organization of this book reflects my aim to intervene and problematize current academic discussions of white ethnicity. In chapter 1, I introduce the core analytical framework of this work. I discuss how a selective corpus of narrative and visual texts (professional folklore, an inchoate popular ethnography, a photograph, a newspaper editorial, and the writings of an intellectual) produces usable ethnic pasts, and I situate these texts in relation to history and social discourse. It is at this point that I demonstrate the pitfalls of analyzing ethnicity on the basis of texts alone and instead make a case for the utility of a discourse-centered, historical approach to ethnicity. I show, in other words, how texts intersect with history and discourse. To this end, I include an analysis of an inchoate popular ethnography, a text extracted from an interview that a professional folklorist conducted with members of an ethnic family. By reembedding this textual fragment in history and examining its relation to various social discourses, I show how this method helps interrogate scholarly and popular constructions of the folk and to enrich our understanding of the production of usable ethnic pasts.
In chapter 2, I continue to critically probe scholarly works that produce generalized meanings about ethnicity. I specifically take to task claims about the uniform decline of deep cultural commitments among white ethnics. Here, I turn on its head the common view of assimilation as cultural loss and examine assimilation—paradoxically—as production of ethnic particularity. For this purpose I analyze a documentary film as a narrative that assimilates Greek America into ethnic whiteness while simultaneously reproducing ethnicity as enduring collective obligation to a specific form of cultural affiliation.
In chapter 3, I further interrogate the notion of the dissolution of collective ethnicity and therefore complicate the proposition of entirely privatized white ethnic identities. Tracing the historical contour of gender construction in Greek America, I illuminate why and how two specific popular ethnographers produce competing versions of ethnic community and, therefore, polyphonies of collective Greek American belonging. Taken together, these constructions challenge the ideology of ethnicity as a homogeneous culture.
In chapter 4, I enter the political minefield of popular ethnography as cultural critique. I probe popular ethnographies that decidedly and unambiguously indict Greek America from within, leveling charges of racism and complicity in ideologies of whiteness. Sensitive to the significance of these internal critiques—but also vigilant as to the implications—I carefully discuss their politics and poetics, illuminating the consequences of white racial domination of vulnerable minorities. Within this context, I showcase an ethnic intellectual who advocates an antiracist politics based on social solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities.
In chapters 5 and 6, I undertake a long-overdue critique of the ideology of white ethnic identity as choice. In chapter 5, I examine one popular ethnographer’s quest for roots, analyzing this ethnography of travel as a site of identity formation. I show how culture and history powerfully mediate if not partly determine this narrative construction of identity. In chapter 6, I continue this critical polemic through an alternative reading of the popular ethnography of travel, this time focusing on the historical routes of ethnic meanings. The analytical shift from roots to routes enables me to situate the current production of usable pasts historically and to place ethnicity in terms of cultural domination and power relations. I show that a historical approach to white ethnicity directs one away from the mystifying ideology of choice and toward a view of whiteness as a process of contextual negotiation and oppression, in which certain ethnic “options” become available or privileged (or, more precisely, are produced as options) while others are displaced, stigmatized, or even eliminated.
The conclusion points to a dramatic tension in how popular ethnographies construct white ethnicity. Ethnicity may be seen as a richly textured social terrain but also as a culturally impoverished landscape. It may be seen as a site that requires historical memory for its realization or, alternatively, as a site that affords the opportunity to actualize without it. And it may sustain antiracist politics or appropriate for itself social privileges at the expense of racial minorities. This polyphony complicates the current thinking of ethnic whiteness as a culturally superficial and uniformly antiminority field. My work identifies those usable pasts offering an enticing model that ratifies a progressive present and shapes a promising future. A corpus of popular ethnographies rewrites pasts as contemporary resources that inspire commitment to social justice, drive an ethic of care, shape meaningful lives, counter amnesia, and inform creative performances of identity. As they do so, they convey a powerful critique, expressed as structure of feeling that interrogates the relegation of ethnicity to the realm of a cultural wasteland. Certain popular ethnographers writing within Greek America caution us that histories of assimilation and cultural caricaturing jeopardize the obligation of ethnics to remember historically, urging us not to forget that dominant groups crush minorities and exclude the most vulnerable of the population. And the ethnographers powerfully feel that this act of domination must not be repeated in the present, now that white ethnics are perhaps closer than ever in their aspiration to hegemony.
CHAPTER ONE
The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography
Folk Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racial Pasts in History and Discourse
We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented … in such works.
—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
IN THIS SCHOLARLY intervention, I rely neither on statistical data to tabulate objective patterns of cultural retention or loss nor on interviews and surveys to identify degrees of subjective attachment to ethnicity. The aim is not the collection of statistically significant evidence that disrupts conventional interpretations of white ethnicity. Instead, I build on the close reading of texts. I undertake the critical reading of a selected corpus of popular ethnographies to examine how ethnic meanings are produced and what this production tells us about white ethnicity. In other words, I explore how and why these ethnographies construct ethnicity by asking the following broad questions: Who defines usable pasts, where, for what purpose, and under what conditions? What are the uses of the past in each case, and how do they reproduce or contest ethnic whiteness?
I analyze this textual corpus by foregrounding ethnicity as a heterogeneous social field defined by similarities but also by internal differences, conflict and consensus, consistency and contradiction, resistance and accommodation, negotiation and consent. That is, I offer a venue to investigate ethnicity not as a shared culture, but as a field of contested meanings. Here I draw on a particular Gramscian thread of cultural studies that examines culture as a field “marked by a struggle to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate particular meanings, particular ideologies, particular