simultaneously positing ancient Greece as a cultural and political archetype of white America, as an early immigrant elite did, a dominant Greek American discourse has consistently presented (and continues to present, as I will show in chapter 2) Greek Americans as active participants in the making of American political and cultural life. Not unlike the Corombos narrative, this discourse of beginnings attempts to reverse deeply ingrained hierarchies between the immigrants and the American hosts. It seeks to subvert the historical devaluation of the Greeks as primitive folk who were rendered unworthy (and incapable) of equal participation in early twentieth-century American modernity.8
Who are the Coromboses? Or, more precisely, who are they made to be in this ethnographic encounter? Once we analyze the exchange between folklorist and family through its textual politics and poetics and situate it in history and in relation to extratextual discourses, we see that no single answer can capture the identity of these individuals. Caught in the disciplinary net of folklore, they are made to possess a premodern folkness. As subjects entangled in a specific historical negotiation with the discourse of Western Hellenism they represent exemplary modern Greeks. But in their performance of folk knowledge, they stake a claim not only to a Greek identity but also to an American affiliation. Simultaneously folk, white ethnic, modern Greek, Greek American, and American, they inhabit a plurality of subject positions and advance a complexity that interrupts any scholarly attempt to fix them as persevering folk or as ethnics on the verge of assimilation. The ethnographic encounter between Dorson and the Corombos family foregrounds the importance of history and discourse in the negotiation over the meaning of ethnicity. The poetics and politics that construe the ethnic family as Greek and American, folk and modern, ethnic and white, cannot be appreciated in its complexity without delving into the historical discourses that framed immigrant negotiation with American modernity. The family produces ethnic meanings at the intersection of the discipline of folklore, popular ethnography, and social discourses such as Hellenism.
This is, then, how this book will proceed, paying attention to texts and contexts, to history and discourse, to popular ethnography and professional anthropology and folklore, to intellectuals, academics, and the “folk” as they contribute to making usable pasts and situate themselves in relation to whiteness. It will look at the making of selective dimensions of the past and the way in which these structures of the old are given a new life, an animating ethnic purpose, today. My reading, then, of the transmutations of the past into the present finds inspiration in the critical project described by Said (1994) and introduced in the preface of this chapter, to examine, that is, dominant discourses “with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (66). In the remainder of this section, I proceed to discuss the three historical moments of representation that I outlined earlier in order to illuminate further intersections between the immigrant vernacular and modernity, and to identify additional ways in which canonical texts contain the plurality of ethnic pasts.
Transnational Pasts and the Making of the Modern Folk (Late 1910s, Early 1920s)
A photograph of early Greek immigrants taken in 1917 on the occasion of the Fourth of July celebrations in the nation’s capital dramatizes how the immigrants visually narrated their national pasts for public consumption (see Warnke 1996). In it, a Greek delegation poses in front of the U.S. Treasury, a neoclassical building located at the civic heart of the city. Strategically staged, the picture is rich in meaning; it showcases ethnic particularity as it simultaneously communicates cultural affinity with and political loyalty to the host nation. Variously dressed as ancient Greek soldiers standing on guard and as folk in dancing postures, the immigrants display their costumed bodies as signs of the temporal continuity of the Greek nation. They appear to embody the uninterrupted continuation of the ethnos, encapsulated around the two symbolic poles that historically organized Greek national identity: Hellas, the golden age of ancient Greece; and the diachronic heritage of the folk.9 The common people, according to the principles of Herderian romantic nationalism, were the vessel that preserved the authentic national spirit up to modern times, despite intervening and interfering foreign invasions and conquests.
But the photograph does not record a mere unreflective transplantation of Greek ethnicity into the host national space. It represents not the intrusion of a foreign body, but a negotiation that becomes evident once one decodes the additional signs that nuance the visual enactment of cultural and ethnic (racial) continuity. Posing in front of the neoclassical government building serves two functions: it showcases the political and cultural currency of ancient Greek culture in the United States while simultaneously advancing the immigrant claim to ownership of the cultural capital of classical Greece.10 The narrative of continuity and the adoption of ancient Greek political culture by the host society support the articulation of an ideological commonplace in Greek America: the persistent claim of the compatibility, even confluence, of American and Greek cultures. As the racial descendants and, by the principles of biological determinism, the cultural inheritors of classical Greece, Greek immigrants not only were endowed with the potential to embrace “Americanness” but also had access to “Ur-Americanness.”
The popularization of a resonance between an immigrant minority and its host, however, becomes politically possible on the basis of discontinuity. A banner announcing the “Upcoming Victory of the Allies”—conspicuously displayed at the upper center of the photograph—subtly redirects the interpretive framework. Read in the context of war politics, which promoted assimilation and framed the immigrant desire for political and social inclusion in American society, this sign marks a shift in the way in which immigrants saw themselves as political subjects. As historian Ioanna Laliotou (2004) shows, immigrants eagerly capitalized on Fourth of July parades as ideal public forums in which to reconfigure their political identification and proclaim their loyalty to America during a time of war. In this manner, the ideology of ethnic continuity was retained, but the narrative of national continuity was disrupted. On the one hand, the visual display of ancient Greek and vernacular forms pointed to “the cultural and civilizational value inherent in Greek descent” (124) and, therefore, to ethnic filiation. The performance of immigrant loyalty and belonging to the adopted homeland, on the other hand, served a denationalizing function. The declaration of political and social commitment to U.S. interests denationalized Greek history, since the display of Greek cultural symbols in the parades ceased to “operate as symbolic representations of national existence and sovereignty” (ibid.). Rather, their meaning was contained as depoliticized ethnic manifestations “of high cultural and ideological traits that were supposedly inherently embodied by Greek migrants” (124–25). Until the postwar rise of American nationalism, it was possible for the immigrants to publicly deploy a dual mode of identification for popular consumption. This investment in making the ethnic past conform with political expectations of Americanness was “based on the condition that America could accommodate transnational forms of identification” (125). But soon a militant assimilationism and exclusionist nativism coerced immigrants to rewrite their connections with their cherished pasts.
The site represented in the photograph is one among many—the home, the coffeehouse, the church, the workplace, the community, theatrical plays, regional societies, histories and folklore monographs, ethnic media, literature, intellectual and artistic societies—where early Greek immigrants negotiated the place of their pasts in America. The photograph simultaneously represents an instance of transnational continuity and a rupture from the ancestral nation-state as the primary site of attachment. The visual expression of ethnic continuity certainly imports the Greek state’s ideology, which, in the context of nation building, sought to integrate unlettered peasants into the grand narrative of the nation. Often told, most notably by Michael Herzfeld, this story of producing the folk as national subjects who embody the glorious ancient past redirects how we gaze at the photograph.
The immigrants at the U.S. Treasury perform a scripted version of the past, as it was produced at the time by Greek academic discourses, such as folklore, and by cultural movements, such as demoticism, both of which nationalized the vernacular. As folklorist and classicist Margaret
