Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America

Notes

 Notes Introduction:Why White Ethnicity?Why Ethnic Pasts? 1. K. S. Brown andYannis Hamilakis’s reflections on the notion of “usable pasts” are pertinent here:“[I]f the idea of history is limited to the investigation of‘what really happened ’in the past,then it is hard to argue for its relevance or pragmatic utility.If,on the other hand, the historian claims for his or her conclusions about the past some present or future significance, then she or he tacitly surrenders the disinterested status of the discipline” (2003, 1).The idea of a usable past serving contemporary interests is central to various disciplines.Writing in the context of American literary history in 1918,Van Wyck Brooks stated:“Discover, invent a usable past we certainly can, and that is what a vital criticism always does” (169).The idea has deep roots among professional historians in the United States, where history suffers from “low prestige” (Brown and Hamilakis 2003, 1). Since the 1950s, historians have made “[v]arious attempts . . . to grant to responsible history use-value as a‘public good’ which might further self-understanding, for individuals and communities” (ibid.). Folklorists have investigated how usable pasts can shape identities at the group level, including ethnicity (Tuleja 1997). 2.Tellingly, the notion of the past as a resource to anchor the future of GreekAmerica figured prominently in the Fourth Annual Conference on the Future of Hellenism in America sponsored by the American Hellenic Institute Foundation, a think tank (see Karageorge 2006). Academics writing on Greek America point to the importance of usable pasts as a resource for cultural survival (Georgakas 2004–5; Triandis, 1987). Psychologist Harry Triandis, for instance, reflects on “how the education of Greek Americans may be structured in order to retain desirable elements and suppress the undesirable ones” (1987, 19). 3.This work of fiction reconfigures traditional masculine competitiveness and the immigrant code of the Cretan vendetta—a customary system that locks generations of families in a vicious cycle of honor crimes—into an ethos of ethnic community harmony in the host society, which is reconfigured as home (Anagnostu 1993–94). This cover photograph may function in this context as a sign of what anthropologist Renaldo Rosaldo (1993) calls “imperialist nostalgia” (68), a sentiment “revolv[ing] around a paradox: A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention” (69–70).The photograph may be interpreted as an “innocent yearning” (70) for a bygone past defined by competitive masculinity, albeit in a novel that itself seeks to dismantle it—to banish it from GreekAmerica.  Notes to Pages 5–12 4.An image of gun-holding Cretan males in full traditional regalia is also featured on the cover of an ethnography on Cretan identity, Michael Herzfeld’s Poetics of Manhood (1985). Exoticism may have served anthropology well in the past, but it has become contested by politically vulnerable populations seeking greater control over self-representation. 5. Helen Papanikolas saw the accurate reconstruction of the past as the primary responsibility of a historian.This conviction served to answer her detractors.When confronted by the aforementioned dissenter, she reportedly “blinked with astonishment, as she always does when such a question emerges, and said‘but that is what they did.That was the custom’” (Smart 2005, 119). 6.Anthony Smith (1999) has written voluminously about the importance of the past in the making of ethnicity. 7.As David Sutton (1998) cautions, “heritage” and “tradition” are to be understood not as a priori classifications, but as contingent social categories whose uses and meanings must be examined in the specific contexts in which they are deployed. He points out that “even within cultures, the past comes in many different containers bearing differing labels, from‘history’ to‘tradition,’ from‘custom’ to‘heritage.’” The “different valences [of] these categories” and the distinct cultural work that they perform are often erased when analysts who implicitly “share many of these categories” impose them on local ethnographic realities (3). 8. John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s candidate for the U.S presidency in 2004, for instance, positioned Greek Americans within the orbit of proper American ethnics: “The Greek values of family, hard work, education, civic engagement and love of country areAmerican values”(quoted in“KerryAddresses the GreekAmerican Community,” National Herald, October 9–10, 2004, 9). 9.The literature on whiteness is too voluminous to fully...