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 I n t r o d u c t i o n WhyWhite 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 AsianAmericanTheater” 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 asArmenianAmericans , 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  c o n t o u r s o f w h i t e e t h n i c i t y 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 onAmerican 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 [3.141.200.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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