Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou
hills. The giants attempted to kill the little fellow by pounding his bed with an ax. But in the morning the youth, whom they had presumably chopped in a thousand pieces, reappeared, complaining that the bedbugs had been scratching him all night long. Impressed and overawed, the giants named him captain. And thenceforth carried out his orders. The Americans picked up baseball from this adventure, and the New York Giants began swinging bats two thousand years after the Greek giants had swung axes. (1977, 164–65)
To recognize the irony in Dorson’s interpretation of the Greek claim to the origins of baseball, we must place this narrative in the historical context of Greek identity. The folklorist bypasses the national significance of the narrative, treating it as a “lighter tale.” From his longstanding interest in motif analysis, he draws on “comparative folklore theory” (Georges 1989, 7) to place the narrative on the origins of baseball in relation to the European tale tradition. But had Richard Dorson read the work of Nikos Politis (1852–1921), the founder of the discipline of folklore in Greece, that knowledge would have constrained him to interpret the interview material differently.5 Folk references to Hellenes, a giant race of mythical ancestors of superhuman size and strength, served for Politis as irrefutable evidence of the continuing use of the word as a term of national self-ascription, a name that he favored over that of Romii. Whether these references in popular tradition “represent the survival of a true self-designation” or whether they “may be metaphorical in origin” is a moot point (Herzfeld 1986a, 127–28). Of relevance here is the realization that popular circulation of Hellenic markers of identity cannot be treated as evidence of an authentic folk knowledge but only as a site of cross-fertilization between popular and literary sources (Herzfeld 1986a, 125; Alexiou 1984–85, 20). This realization shifts the analysis of folk tradition from “pure orality” to “literary orality,” toward the contextual analysis, that is, of the interaction between the textual and the oral (ibid.).6
Dorson’s folk historians appropriated an item of popular and literary tradition to create a usable past in the context of the ethnographic encounter. I suggest that the narrative on the Greek derivation of baseball functions to inscribe the ethnic folk within American modernity, not outside it. Establishing the modernity of the folk in turn averts the hierarchical impulse to classify ethnics as less modern and, by implication, less American. The narrative does not merely claim ethnic origins for a quintessentially national (American) pastime. The Greek invention of an American sport additionally works as a claim to beginnings, in the sense that it views the Greek past as an active cultural force that shapes the present (see Said 1975). The national past of the folk is afforded supreme value in that it functions as a model worth emulating. This narrative of beginnings establishes continuity between the Greek past and the American present as it underwrites Greek cultural authority over a quintessential American pastime, baseball. It collapses the distinction between the premodern and the modern, the ethnic and the national. It therefore authorizes the family to identify itself as authentically Greek (by virtue of ancestry) and American (by virtue of shared culture). If the interview points to the family’s folkness, the narrative decidedly illuminates the family’s Western (and by implication white) pedigree. It deflects, therefore, the Orientalist and primitivist gaze that any reference to irrational beliefs ostensibly invites. To put it differently, if the ethnic family is indeed premodern by the virtue of its beliefs in superstitions, so is the entire baseball community, a network of players, coaches, and audiences who thrive on the practice of superstition (Gmelch 1984). As popular theoreticians, the Coromboses shatter the hierarchical dichotomy between ethnic folk and modern national subjects.
The Coromboses responded to Dorson’s romantic nationalism with a folk version of its Greek counterpart, one that reverses the historical devaluation of the immigrant folk. The fact that immigrants indeed possess folklore makes them neither alien primitives nor devalued Orientals, but equal participants in America. The ethnic folk and the inquiring folklorist inhabit a common temporal civilizational plane; a claim to origins establishes a fundamental coevality between the family and their prestigious visitor as it simultaneously subverts the structural hierarchy between the educated academic and the ethnic folk.7
To fully grasp the implications of the story’s claim to beginnings, we must place it in relation to Greek immigrant negotiations with American modernity. Neither an idiosyncratic nor a merely creative cultural appropriation, the narrative about the Greek invention of baseball belongs to a foundational identity narrative. In fact, the text produced by the Coromboses constitutes a component of early immigrant historiography, which located Greek America within “the ‘illustrious’ history of Classical Hellenism attributing a semi-divine origin to Greek Americans” (Kalogeras 1992, 17). These historical narratives are in turn part of a wider social discourse that encompasses them. Whether claiming Greek ancestry for Christopher Columbus, as historian Seraphim Canoutas did in Christopher Columbus: A Greek Nobleman (1943), or whether designating Greek immigrants in America as the racial inheritors of the classical legacy while simultaneously positing ancient Greece as a cultural and political archetype of white America, as an early immigrant elite did, a dominant Greek American discourse has consistently presented (and continues to present, as I will show in chapter 2) Greek Americans as active participants in the making of American political and cultural life. Not unlike the Corombos narrative, this discourse of beginnings attempts to reverse deeply ingrained hierarchies between the immigrants and the American hosts. It seeks to subvert the historical devaluation of the Greeks as primitive folk who were rendered unworthy (and incapable) of equal participation in early twentieth-century American modernity.8
Who are the Coromboses? Or, more precisely, who are they made to be in this ethnographic encounter? Once we analyze the exchange between folklorist and family through its textual politics and poetics and situate it in history and in relation to extratextual discourses, we see that no single answer can capture the identity of these individuals. Caught in the disciplinary net of folklore, they are made to possess a premodern folkness. As subjects entangled in a specific historical negotiation with the discourse of Western Hellenism they represent exemplary modern Greeks. But in their performance of folk knowledge, they stake a claim not only to a Greek identity but also to an American affiliation. Simultaneously folk, white ethnic, modern Greek, Greek American, and American, they inhabit a plurality of subject positions and advance a complexity that interrupts any scholarly attempt to fix them as persevering folk or as ethnics on the verge of assimilation. The ethnographic encounter between Dorson and the Corombos family foregrounds the importance of history and discourse in the negotiation over the meaning of ethnicity. The poetics and politics that construe the ethnic family as Greek and American, folk and modern, ethnic and white, cannot be appreciated in its complexity without delving into the historical discourses that framed immigrant negotiation with American modernity. The family produces ethnic meanings at the intersection of the discipline of folklore, popular ethnography, and social discourses such as Hellenism.
This is, then, how this book will proceed, paying attention to texts and contexts, to history and discourse, to popular ethnography and professional anthropology and folklore, to intellectuals, academics, and the “folk” as they contribute to making usable pasts and situate themselves in relation to whiteness. It will look at the making of selective dimensions of the past and the way in which these structures of the old are given a new life, an animating ethnic purpose, today. My reading, then, of the transmutations of the past into the present finds inspiration in the critical project described by Said (1994) and introduced in the preface of this chapter, to examine, that is, dominant discourses “with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (66). In the remainder of this section, I proceed to discuss the three historical moments of representation that I outlined earlier in order to illuminate further intersections between the immigrant vernacular and modernity, and to identify additional ways in which canonical texts contain the plurality of ethnic pasts.
Transnational Pasts and the Making of the Modern Folk (Late 1910s, Early 1920s)
A photograph of early Greek immigrants taken in 1917 on the occasion of the Fourth of July celebrations in the nation’s capital dramatizes how the immigrants visually narrated their national pasts for public consumption