popular periodicals, ethnic and immigrant family biographies, autobiographies, folk dance performances, documentaries, and museum exhibits on ethnicity are all components of generalized ethnography. The producers of these ethnography-centered cultural products (self-proclaimed folklorists, oral-history collectors, community archivists, librarians turned ethnic preservationists, authors of immigrant narratives, documentary makers, or “folk” folklorists) are literally everywhere. Under these conditions, sorting out what to analyze and what to exclude from analysis becomes an acute methodological challenge. What are the criteria that will allow the displacement of some texts and the privileging of others? What are the politics of reading that will position a metaethnographer to negotiate responsibly this fuzzy, anarchic, and vastly complex field? Inherently ideological, contested, and infused with relations of power, this terrain requires methodological management, a strategic containment through an explicit politics of knowledge.16
I do not claim to read Greek American popular ethnographies from a position of disinterest. The “remaking of social analysis” (Rosaldo 1993) has made it epistemologically and politically impossible to claim a detached Archimedean point from which an omniscient scholar surveys the social field independent of power relations, material and ideological interests, and prior knowledge. Critical reflexivity demands the explicit recognition of the analyst’s subject position rather than a pretension to objectivity. It goes without saying that my current institutional location in a modern Greek studies program motivates my “choice” of Greek America as the focus of my analysis. Teaching and research in this academic field require that Greek-related topics become an indispensable component of my interest in producing and disseminating knowledge. The explicit recognition of this position helps me further sharpen the focus on my politics of knowledge. I draw my critical agenda from a body of scholarship that consistently reflects on the critical function and relevance of modern Greek studies, an academic field that operates at the institutional fringes of the American academy.
As Gregory Jusdanis (1991, 11) writes, “Disciplines like modern Greek, though marginalized at the university, need not be irrelevant…. Instead of bewailing their banishment to the fringe they can benefit from their ostracism by conducting a critique of the center.” Writing from such a position demarcates my critical vantage point. I interrogate hegemonic academic practices whose unexamined disciplinary assumptions or politics contain the range of available meanings associated with white ethnicity or, alternatively, promote its social and political trivialization. From this angle, I wish to intervene strategically and to confront influential scholarly trends in sociology and race studies that represent European ethnicities in terms of dissolution, closure, and disposability.17 My aim is to survey the complexity of Greek America and to select for analysis those texts that make accessible a set of meanings not otherwise available in dominant academic narratives about white ethnicities. While I do not shy away from interrogating dominant white ethnic narratives for their complicity in generating ahistorical accounts of diversity, I also showcase those usable pasts that challenge hegemonic interpretations in the sociology of ethnicity. In this respect, my work raises broad interpretive questions and redraws the conceptual boundaries in the study of white ethnicities. For instance, whereas scholars who privilege race as an analytical category project the weakening of collective ethnic identities, I illuminate usable pasts constructed to forge enduring group commitments. In addition, if symbolic ethnicity privileges choice in the making of ethnic identities, I demonstrate the importance of social discourses and history in determining identities. In my analysis, white ethnicity emerges as a heterogeneous social field constituted by agency and cultural determination, ambivalence and certainty, open-endedness and closure, private creativity and collective belonging—an uneven field marked by contested cultural boundaries and defined by alternative social meanings.
The organization of this book reflects my aim to intervene and problematize current academic discussions of white ethnicity. In chapter 1, I introduce the core analytical framework of this work. I discuss how a selective corpus of narrative and visual texts (professional folklore, an inchoate popular ethnography, a photograph, a newspaper editorial, and the writings of an intellectual) produces usable ethnic pasts, and I situate these texts in relation to history and social discourse. It is at this point that I demonstrate the pitfalls of analyzing ethnicity on the basis of texts alone and instead make a case for the utility of a discourse-centered, historical approach to ethnicity. I show, in other words, how texts intersect with history and discourse. To this end, I include an analysis of an inchoate popular ethnography, a text extracted from an interview that a professional folklorist conducted with members of an ethnic family. By reembedding this textual fragment in history and examining its relation to various social discourses, I show how this method helps interrogate scholarly and popular constructions of the folk and to enrich our understanding of the production of usable ethnic pasts.
In chapter 2, I continue to critically probe scholarly works that produce generalized meanings about ethnicity. I specifically take to task claims about the uniform decline of deep cultural commitments among white ethnics. Here, I turn on its head the common view of assimilation as cultural loss and examine assimilation—paradoxically—as production of ethnic particularity. For this purpose I analyze a documentary film as a narrative that assimilates Greek America into ethnic whiteness while simultaneously reproducing ethnicity as enduring collective obligation to a specific form of cultural affiliation.
In chapter 3, I further interrogate the notion of the dissolution of collective ethnicity and therefore complicate the proposition of entirely privatized white ethnic identities. Tracing the historical contour of gender construction in Greek America, I illuminate why and how two specific popular ethnographers produce competing versions of ethnic community and, therefore, polyphonies of collective Greek American belonging. Taken together, these constructions challenge the ideology of ethnicity as a homogeneous culture.
In chapter 4, I enter the political minefield of popular ethnography as cultural critique. I probe popular ethnographies that decidedly and unambiguously indict Greek America from within, leveling charges of racism and complicity in ideologies of whiteness. Sensitive to the significance of these internal critiques—but also vigilant as to the implications—I carefully discuss their politics and poetics, illuminating the consequences of white racial domination of vulnerable minorities. Within this context, I showcase an ethnic intellectual who advocates an antiracist politics based on social solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities.
In chapters 5 and 6, I undertake a long-overdue critique of the ideology of white ethnic identity as choice. In chapter 5, I examine one popular ethnographer’s quest for roots, analyzing this ethnography of travel as a site of identity formation. I show how culture and history powerfully mediate if not partly determine this narrative construction of identity. In chapter 6, I continue this critical polemic through an alternative reading of the popular ethnography of travel, this time focusing on the historical routes of ethnic meanings. The analytical shift from roots to routes enables me to situate the current production of usable pasts historically and to place ethnicity in terms of cultural domination and power relations. I show that a historical approach to white ethnicity directs one away from the mystifying ideology of choice and toward a view of whiteness as a process of contextual negotiation and oppression, in which certain ethnic “options” become available or privileged (or, more precisely, are produced as options) while others are displaced, stigmatized, or even eliminated.
The conclusion points to a dramatic tension in how popular ethnographies construct white ethnicity. Ethnicity may be seen as a richly textured social terrain but also as a culturally impoverished landscape. It may be seen as a site that requires historical memory for its realization or, alternatively, as a site that affords the opportunity to actualize without it. And it may sustain antiracist politics or appropriate for itself social privileges at the expense of racial minorities. This polyphony complicates the current thinking of ethnic whiteness as a culturally superficial and uniformly antiminority field. My work identifies those usable pasts offering an enticing model that ratifies a progressive present and shapes a promising
