Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou
was the one to supply a cheerful outlook when difficulties cast a heavy weight on my shoulders. From far away, Vangelis Calotychos, Stathis Gourgouris, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Smaro Kamboureli, Neni Panourgiá, Penelope Papailias, David Sutton, and Bonnie Urciuoli all crucially contributed through their intellectual support, their conversations, and their work. They have served as an inspiring compass to critically navigate the territory of ethnicity and ethnography. From the start, my editor Gill Berchowitz exhibited an unwavering faith in this project. I express my profound appreciation for her crucial support in critical times of its development. I am also thankful to Rick Huard, whose editorial assistance greatly contributed to the improvement of this work. Last, but not least, I thank the unsung heroes of academic life, the administrative associates. I cannot thank enough the late Mary Cole, as well as Suzanne Childs and Wayne Lovely, for creatively solving all kinds of problems and for creating a welcoming sense of home away from home.
I am devastated that my mother is no longer with us to see this book come to fruition. The fact that I cannot share the joy with her, the person to whom I owe the strength to persevere in the face of extreme adversities, weighs unbearably upon me.
With Ana, we have journeyed the last twenty-three years along contours that have been hospitable to all kinds of differences and yet familiar with the commonalities that inhabit the spaces of the margins. I couldn’t have written this book without her—she was always near, even when geography kept us apart.
PARTS of this book were published in early versions as follows: “Metaethnography in the Age of ‘Popular Folklore,’” Journal of American Folklore 119, no. 474 (2006): 381–412; “Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, ‘Whiteness,’ American Hellenism, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 21, no. 1 (2004): 25–71; and “Model Americans, Quintessential Greeks: Ethnic Success and Assimilation in Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 12, no. 3 (2003): 279–327.
INTRODUCTION
Why White Ethnicity? Why Ethnic Pasts?
[T]he search or struggle for a sense of ethnic identity is a (re-)invention and discovery of a vision, both ethical and future-oriented. Whereas the search for coherence is grounded in a connection to the past, the meaning abstracted from that past, an important criterion of coherence, is an ethic workable for the future.
—Michael Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory”
As more of us anthropologists from the borderlands go “home” to study “our own communities,” we will probably see increasing elisions of boundaries between ethnography and “minority discourse,” in which writing ethnography becomes another way of writing our own identities and communities.
—Dorinne Kondo, “The Narrative Production of ‘Home,’ Community, and Political Identity in Asian American Theater”
IN THIS WORK I explore the social category of “white ethnicity” in the United States. A classification that emerged and gained currency during the civil rights era, white ethnicity refers to hyphenated populations that trace their origins to Europe but also to countries and areas in relative proximity to it. This ascription incorporates both ethnic and racialized dimensions, attaching to these populations both cultural attributes and inescapable racialized overtones. It indicates, therefore, how white ethnics are placed in multiple, yet interrelated, systems of difference within the nation. On the one hand, groups such as Armenian Americans, Greek Americans, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Polish Americans are recognized as distinctly ethnic, claiming unique cultures, histories, and religions. The Americanization of these populations, on the other hand, has entailed a specific kind of assimilation, their eventual incorporation into whiteness. It is this racialization that marks these groups in counterdistinction to “nonwhite” racial minorities. Therefore, the ethnoracial label “white ethnic” simultaneously accomplishes two distinct classificatory functions. On the one hand, the racialized ascription places these collectives within the boundaries of whiteness, pointing to their current entrenchment as white in the national imagination. On the other hand, the ethnic marker attaches a cultural hue that differentiates these populations from unmarked whiteness. It is often thought that white ethnics possess culture, in contrast to the cultureless whiteness of the general population. Racially denigrated and classified as nonwhite in the past, people now designated “white ethnics” define themselves against the backdrop of complex social and political struggles over assimilation and cultural preservation, and histories of brutal symbolic and physical violence over their racial and ethnic place in American society.
In this book I analyze the ways in which one specific group of white ethnics, Greek Americans, represent themselves, undertaking this task from a specific vantage point: I examine how their past is made to matter in the present. I probe, in other words, the enduring relevance of ethnic pasts for the contemporary social imagination. Specifically, I investigate how practices and values associated with the past and glossed as “tradition,” “folklore,” “heritage,” “custom,” or “immigrant culture” are endowed with significance today. I analyze how various pasts are used to create identities and communities and to imagine the future of ethnicity. I identify specific texts and practices where such pasts are produced, and I investigate their social and political valence. I ask why and how selective pasts are retained, reworked, dismantled, discarded, or contested in the making of ethnicity. I illuminate the visions of social life that these engagements with the past endorse and what all of this tells us about present-day white ethnicity.
My aim here is to provide an analysis of how these pasts are produced and by whom, of what interests they advance and for whom. I am interested, that is, in the poetics and politics of white ethnic pasts. In this analysis, I wish to initiate a critical discussion that investigates academic and popular understandings of ethnic whiteness. I frame this category as a contested, heterogeneous cultural field whose complexity and relevance for social life has been downplayed, even maligned, in larger debates about diversity. I argue that bringing the past into the present to produce usable ethnic pasts illuminates dimensions of white ethnicity that discussions on American pluralism cannot afford to ignore.1
I strive to focus attention on the notion that ethnic pasts are always plural—not singular or monolithic—and inform the present in ways that are not always clearly discernible. Such perspective demands a bold critical intervention. I intervene in dominant academic and popular representations of ethnicity that tend to erase this diversity and, in the process, take a step toward mapping how multiple pasts give texture to the contours of the field of ethnic whiteness in the United States.
My project emerges from and participates in a number of intersecting academic conversations in anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic and racial studies, folklore, modern Greek studies, sociology, and women’s studies. One common thread in these discussions involves the cultural politics framing the social production of the past. As a domain made rather than found, the past generates passionate struggles over its meaning. Ownership of the past is an important power relation, one grounded in the ability of particular social groups to establish those versions of historical truth that serve their own interests. One must therefore pay attention to the political and social implications associated with questions about who narrates the past and who is excluded—and for what purpose. These are but a few of the important issues discussed by the current burgeoning academic interest in cultural memory, tradition, heritage, and historical consciousness. The stakes in the way in which critical scholarship engages with these questions are high. The construction of usable pasts today guides how ethnicity is imagined tomorrow. Ethnic memory, as Michael Fischer (1986) puts it, is “or ought to be, future, not past, oriented” (201). Or, in the words of Raymond Williams (1977), those traditions selected to “ratify the present” powerfully “indicate directions for the future” (116).2
In this introduction, I explore through various paths the significance of the past for white ethnicity. One such path leads to a recent debate over the depiction of early twentieth-century immigrants and illuminates the point that what could count as a past is a contested, problematic site within an ethnic collective. In revisiting this dispute, I bring to the fore a concept often forgotten in popular thought about