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1. The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography: Folk Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racial Pasts in History and Discourse
- Ohio University Press
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C h a p t e r o n e 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 andAmerican 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. —EdwardW. Said, Culture and Imperialism In this scholarly intervention, I rely neither on statistical data to tabulate objectivepatternsofculturalretentionorlossnoroninterviewsandsurveysto 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 politics” (Storey 2003, xi). If “[m]eaning is always a social production, a human practice,” white ethnicity must be seen in terms of texts and practices that c o n t o u r s o f w h i t e e t h n i c i t y contribute to its making.And white ethnicity cannot generate a single, authoritative interpretation of the past:“because different meanings can be ascribed to the same thing, meaning is always the site and the result of struggle” (ibid.). I have already identified my object of analysis: popular ethnography. As interpretive descriptions of social life, these ethnographic accounts conveniently offer an opportunity to explore the multilayered contours of white ethnicity. In reading ethnographies, I do not assume that these texts offer transparent reflections of reality, faithful mirrors of the worlds they depict. As foundational work on the politics and poetics of ethnography has shown (Clifford and Marcus 1986), ethnographies are narratives that rest on rhetorical strategies of persuasion to establish authority and to produce convincing representations of social life.What this means, of course, is not that ethnographies are lies—and therefore illegitimate sources of knowledge about white ethnicity—but that they tell only partial truths (Clifford 1986a). I draw from this anthropological tradition the insight that attention to how ethnographies make meaning is of particular analytical value in the textual production of usable ethnic pasts.This method of reading becomes useful for interrogating narratives that claim absolute truths about GreekAmerica or white ethnicity.I also use it to recover textual ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and the muting of alternative meanings within a text. Thus, I am interested in the manner in which the politics of ethnicity intertwines with textual poetics. My compass includes the interests that texts serve and the ways in which textual meanings are made rhetorically in the first place. I undertake all this with the goal of writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991), that is, disrupting tendencies to represent white ethnicity as a unified whole, a single demarcated culture. I do not merely analyze texts. Ethnographic truths are embedded in broader impersonal structures and must be situated in relation to wider social discourses. I consider, therefore, textual politics and poetics as well as discourse and history .Attention to history and discourse allows me to conceptualize the terrain of ethnicity not in terms of a neatly delineated and already known past. Pasts are not natural facts; instead, they entail knowledge produced at specific moments in history. It becomes of primary analytical importance, then, to identify the specific political and cultural geographies where pasts were created, where they took root or were rerouted, were rejected or revived, were activated or silenced, at any given point in time. In other words, we must carefully scrutinize...