This book explores the social category of “white ethnicity” in the United States by concentrating on the Greek Americans, a distinct ethnic group that claims a unique culture, history, and religion. Though it starts with a very specific study, questioning Greek identity from antiquity to today, the book’s scope becomes wider as it reflects on the past and present of ethnicity in America. The book investigates the assimilation process of Greek immigrants into American culture and explores the construction of ethnic history by revealing how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts.
Yiorgos Anagnostou, author of Contours of White Ethnicity and an associate professor of Modern Greek and American ethnic studies at The Ohio State University, examines, through six chapters, the topics of ethnicity and immigration via various scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, racial studies, women’s studies, folklore, ethnography, sociology, diaspora studies, and modern Greek studies. His introduction revolves around the questions, “why white ethnicity? why ethnic pasts?” To this end, Anagnostou explores the significance of the past as well as the making of difference and similarity for white ethnicity, and searches for a response to the question, “who are the white ethnics?” This question is asked in terms of whiteness, racial hierarchies, ethnic identity, professional anthropology, and flows and circulations of popular ethnography, suggesting a meta-ethnography as critical intervention in an attempt to manage the ethnographic field.
Chapter 1, “The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography: Folk, Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racial Pasts in History and Discourse,” undertakes the critical reading of a selected corpus of popular ethnographies in order to examine how ethnic meanings are produced and what this production tells us about white ethnicity. Questions that guide us through are, “Who defines usable pasts, where, for what purpose, and under what conditions?” and “What are the uses of the past in each case, and how do they reproduce or contest ethnic whiteness?” The author proceeds to examine ethnicity as “folkness” as well as academic construction, the production of Greek America as “folk” as well as the definition of those “folk,” the transnational pasts and the making of the modern folk, the racial pasts as a rewriting of transnational pasts, the mapping of ethnicity onto race as new immigrants become white ethnics, and white ethnicity as contour.
The second chapter, “Whither Collective Ethnic Identities?: White Ethnics and the Slippery Terrain of European Americanness,” explores what happens to American white ethnicities in the era of multiculturalism and the production of ethnicity, in other words, what is commonly called the heritage industry, which, however, simultaneously drives the reconfiguration of the collective into scattered, highly individualized identities in postmodernity. The discussion on the poetics of ethnic homogeneity is followed by others on immigration as redemption in canonical history and popular ethnography, the assimilation of ethnicity into liberal multiculturalism, ethnic futures in the poetics and politics of heritage, model ethnicity as white ethnicity, and racial Hellenism, whiteness, and ethnic identity.
In “Whose Ethnic Community?: Gendered Pasts and Polyphonies of Belonging,” chapter 3, the discourse on “whither the ethnic community” is being configured by looking into the gendered past of the Greek Americans, the gendered spaces of immigrant pasts and ethnic ambivalence, the making of community through historical remembering, the documenting of an oppressed collective, the folk past with patriarchy frozen in time, and the politics of women’s voices and discussions, all of which result in reclaiming the vernacular and the making of community.
Chapter 4, “Interrogating Ethnic Whiteness, Building Interracial Solidarity: Popular Ethnography as Cultural Critique,” explores ethnicity as knowledge and power, as display and concealment in Greek America, as self-critique but also as cultural critique, namely a tale of caution, as our writer perceives it. It proceeds to rehabilitate the vernacular, an allegorical thread in a realist ethnography, which aims to humanize immigrants beyond display and concealment by recognizing the humanity of racialized others via a yearning for empathy and a plea for interracial solidarity.
In the fifth chapter, “Ethnicity as Choice?: Roots and Identity as a Narrative Project,” Anagnostou meditates on identity as narrative by paying, indeed, homage to it as a narrative project. Then follows a discourse on ethnic roots and identity as sameness along with a section on identity as difference in diaspora by placing a specific poem in history. The writer proceeds to examine immigrant histories as roots through anthropology and the poetics of self, and to discuss ethnocentrism, distinction, and histories of oppression. His case study focuses on continuities in regional and family identity via names as a distinguishing feature, which leads to discontinuous continuities and performative excellence in shifting contexts.
The last chapter of the book, “Redirecting Ethnic Options: Historical Routes of Heritage,” outlines literary heritage as a national jewel or placed literature. It continues with discussions on rerouting political activism in the context of both equality and labor struggle, state oppression as “a heritage of fear,” and issues of equality and the antimodernist yearning. Gendered routes of nostalgia but also roots and routes of nostalgia conclude this entry. Lastly, through the afterword, “White Ethnicity as Cultural Becoming,” Anagnostou admits that he deliberately showcases some of the tensions within a distinct space of ethnic whiteness and challenges the reimagining of contours that white ethnicity constantly acquires. His book concludes with notes, a rich list of references, and an index.
Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity is of particular interest to scholars in the humanities, ethnic studies, and social science who are researching ethnicity and race, particularly in an era when, due to the crossings of borders, identities are not always going safely through customs. Can the immigrant past, after all, be used to combat racism and thus bring solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities and, if so, what are the cultural politics framing the social production of that past?
Anagnostou illustrates the politics of histories to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots as well as the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts toward the construction of ethnic identity. The author also depicts how traditions are being negotiated, modified, and reinvented. His study challenges the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category and Greek Americans as “big fat Greek Zorbas”—ways that miss specific identity issues and internal differences—and highlights instead, Greek American life as richly textured, diverse, plural, and multidimensional.
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[Review length: 1076 words • Review posted on June 16, 2011]