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3. Whose Ethnic Community? Gendered Pasts and Polyphonies of Belonging
- Ohio University Press
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C h a p t e r t h r e e Whose Ethnic Community? Gendered Pasts and Polyphonies of Belonging Community, then, is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history. —Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” The author [George Pelecanos] has his own deep bonds of family involvement.“We’ve got this kind of rainbow family. I’ve started from an early age with my children. I’ve taken them to church every Sunday, got them indoctrinated into the Greek community,and they definitely know who they are. “My sons are black, but they also consider themselves to be Greek, and they dig it, because it’s cool to [be] something else other than just a whiteAmerican.” —Robert Krause,“Heart Murmurs from Home” The model of white ethnicity as cultural loss equates the dispersal of ethnics in the suburbs with the depletion of cultural resources that promote collective belonging.Thus it sustains the notion of the dissolution of meaningful ethnic collectivities and the fragmentation of ethnicity into a domain of largely privatized identities.Yet, contrary to this view, popular ethnographies illuminate practices and narratives that anchor individuals into collectives; they posit common experiences and values that construct specifically situated communities.This is not to say that the corpus of these ethnographic texts construes a uniform ethnic culture. On the contrary, because some ethnographies pay attention to differences within the collective, they fracture the ethnic domain of Greek America into Whose Ethnic Community? diverse and sometimes competing constituencies. In other words, the texts I discuss here counter the notion of ethnicity as a homogeneous culture without abandoning the idea of collective belonging. Read against each other, these popular ethnographies help us recognize the expanse of ethnicity as an uneven terrain punctuated by features of internal diversity. One cannot stress enough the notion of internal differentiation of ethnicity . The reduction of ethnicity to a uniform entity serves specific hegemonic interests by excluding or silencing alternative meanings. Therefore, attention to intraethnic differences —based on class, gender, or sexuality, for example— necessarily illuminates all sorts of counterhegemonic perspectives. Hegemony is never a completed process. As previously silenced constituencies vie for public recognition, it becomes increasingly difficult to contain diversity.The critical aim, therefore, is to reframe the analysis of ethnicity away from invariable sameness and toward heterogeneity and the struggle to contest hegemony. As a configuration of contested meanings about origins, roots, ancestors, group membership, and cultural affiliation, ethnicity cannot be thought of apart from internal conflict, dissent, and exclusion. It becomes necessary, then, to sift through popular ethnographies to bring into sharp focus the way in which they build on the past to construct a plurality of ethnic belonging. In this chapter, I complicate the notion of privatized white ethnic identities by juxtaposing two narratives that construct competing meanings of an “ethnic community.” The popular ethnographies I examine here indict a common past, immigrant patriarchy, but they are at odds with each other regarding the kinds of community belonging that they endorse. Specifically, I analyze the writings of Helen Papanikolas and Constance Callinicos to scrutinize how each constructs the past upon which she acts and to chart their respective visions of community and the place of usable pasts in it. I reflect on Papanikolas’s practice of storytelling as a site that discursively actualizes an ethnic collective centered on historical memory. I contrast this intervention with Callinicos’s American Aphrodite:Becoming Female in Greek America (1990). A counternarrative to the hegemony of ethnicity as success, this latter text reclaims vernacular culture for women. It constructs ethnicity as a uniformly oppressive traditional community, envisioning the materialization of women’s liberation through a gendered performance of the past in an exclusively allfemale space. Reading these projects against each other illuminates ethnicity as a site of radical polyphony,in which each voice struggles to produce its own vision of community“in relation to the critical political priorities”of its author (Martin and Mohanty 1986, 210).Taken together, they counter the ethnic amnesia and [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:23 GMT) c o n t o u r s o f w h i t e e t h n i c i t y ahistorical,celebratory heritage narrative underwritten by the...