the category. What media, scholars, politicians, and ethnic leaders presented as a neatly demarcated collective was, in fact, as di Leonardo points out, an assortment of diverse, shifting, mobile, and residentially dispersed populations. Widely disseminated in popular culture, this was an ideological construct created as a political strategy to address profound social rifts. Represented as law-abiding, orderly, patriotic, and hardworking, white ethnics composed the silent majority that stood opposite the collectives pressing the federal government, the states, and social institutions toward reform and, often, radical change. The image of the white ethnic as social exemplar further polarized divisions in a society shaken to the core by the vocal activism of racial minorities, including the black power, civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. The ideology of the white ethnic was consciously embraced and promoted by the political establishment, di Leonardo (1994) maintains, outlining this dynamic:
The Nixon administration in particular sought to exploit and enhance these social divisions through the use of the polarizing discourse of the silent majority—as opposed to the protesting anti-administration “minority.” … [B]etween administration rhetoric and the media’s response, an image grew of this stipulated entity: the silent majority were white (implicitly, white ethnic), largely male, blue-collar workers. They were held to be “patriotic” and to live in “traditional” families—ones in which males ruled, women did not work outside the home for pay, and parents controlled their children. (175)
It is noteworthy that in the writings of ethnic intellectuals such as Novak, the making of the white ethnic followed the template of black nationalism. Di Leonardo, once again, notes: “[K]ey expressions of white ethnic resentment were couched in a language consciously and unconsciously copied from the blacks themselves. Notions of the strength and richness of white ethnic cultures and their repression by WASPs, for example, mimicked black cultural nationalist celebrations of black culture’s endurance despite white domination” (ibid.). But if the immigrant past served as a reference point for the ensuing white ethnic revival or new ethnicity—tentatively in the beginning, and with an increased ethnic confidence later—it was a past that had been seriously reworked for public consumption by the dominant society and the assimilated progeny of the immigrants. In the 1920s, the Chicago School of sociology and anthropology construed urban immigrants from southeastern Europe as caught in the duality “noble versus nasty peasant” (di Leonardo 1998, 87). They were seen “both as the inheritors of Gemeinschaft—the simple, humanly satisfying, face-to-face, traditional rural world that was giving way to the complex, anomic, modern urban world of strangers—and as rude, uncivilized peasants who must modernize, assimilate, Americanize in order to rise to the level of work and social life in the new industrial city” (di Leonardo 1994, 171). As we will see in chapter 2, the highly scripted ethnic festivals in the 1970s and 1980s, sanitized that past. Community closeness and access to an authentic folk past furnished evidence of exotic, domesticated otherness, while the rational management of the festival place implicitly communicated the modernity of the folk, neutralizing in the process the negative image of the uncouth peasant.
White Ethnicity as Contour
It is time to identify interconnections among the practices and moments of representation discussed above and to reflect on how specific intersections help us understand the making of ethnic pasts in relation to whiteness. The ethnographic encounter between the folklorist and the ethnic family; the staged performance of ethnic/racial continuity in front of the U.S. Treasury; the racialization of the immigrants as interstitial whites; and their ethnicization/racialization as white ethnics—all point to ethnicity as a contested terrain of cultural representations. We witness in these examples the power of dominant narratives to displace or marginalize nonhegemonic alternatives. The perspectives of the “folk,” immigrant rejection of whiteness, the anticapitalist function of the vernacular, and nonpopulist views of white ethnics are contained or rendered invisible by professional folklore, assimilationism, and populism. The analysis of these moments of representation in discourse and history makes it possible to illuminate struggles over the production of ethnic meanings and to rehabilitate what has been historically relegated to the margins. It will therefore provide the critical compass throughout this work.
Attention to history and discourse also brings to the fore the notion of ethnicity as a social field crisscrossed with historical junctures and disjunctures. My discussion identifies some continuities and discontinuities at work in Greek America: an ideology central to the constitution of Greek national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the continuity between modern and ancient Greeks proved once again crucial for constructing Greek immigrants, this time as white Americans in the early 1920s. What is more, the continuity thesis was deployed to negotiate the dominant discourse of folklorization in the 1950s and to represent Greeks as white ethnics, not simply ethnic folk. Further historical links abound. The civil rights era representation of white ethnicity intersects with Dorson’s folkloric interest in ethnicizing the descendants of immigrants. But this construction of American ethnics as folk refrained from situating the ethnics in relation to American racial categories. It was the ethnics themselves who in their interaction with the folklorist articulated a view of themselves as white ethnic folk and quintessentially American, a location that escaped Dorson. And it is in the writings of an ethnic intellectual, Novak (among others), that the category of white ethnicity acquires cultural and political valence, becoming entrenched in the national imagination. In this intertwined web of representations, it is critical scholars such as di Leonardo but also occasionally the “folk” themselves that nuance the tendency of social and academic discourses to impose uniformity on the subjects they constitute.
The task here becomes one of finding ways not to allow dominant narratives—the historically privileged and therefore magnified contours of ethnicity—to hide from view a social landscape punctuated by enforced silences, marginalized alternatives, and muted political visions. And the more remote the pasts we investigate, the greater the risk of missing discordance, contestation, and protest. If the way in which dominant Greek American historiography treated that past serves as a guide, the telling of narratives that demarcate Greek America as a cultural whole in linear progression (toward success or assimilation, for example) makes itself vulnerable to charges of being a history of exclusions. Until recently, the immigrant and ethnic left, women’s perspectives, artists, non-Orthodox Greek Americans, civil rights activists, or homosexuals were treated as insignificant historical footnotes.
The analysis of ethnicity in terms of spatial and temporal interrelationships invites the metaphor of ethnicity as a social terrain crisscrossed by contour lines. The image of ethnic contours that I have in mind does not match the logic of a topographical map, where each contour marks a line of equal elevation and where contours never cross. In my view of ethnicity’s map, contours connect texts, statements, and practices that claim to represent ethnicity; because these representations are interrelated in vastly complex ways, ethnic contours intersect, tangentially touch each other, or converge in dense hubs. Ethnic contours meander through history to create unexpected connections and make their ways around dominant representations to open previously untraced links. Despite these fundamental differences between the metaphor of ethnicity as contour and the actual contours of the topographical map, I retain the topographer’s preoccupation with painstakingly charting the unevenness of a terrain through time. This attention to the ways in which contours are shaped diachronically foregrounds the potency of history to shape the terrain of ethnicity, the way in which past and present intertwine. This is why I favor the metaphor “contours of ethnicity” over the other frequent contender, “ethnicity as network.” The latter fails to capture the constitutive dimension of history in charting contemporary ethnicity. A cultural topographer pays paramount attention to the detailed mapping of differential altitude—that is, uneven historical depth—so unlike the even plane suggested by the image of the network. Densely packed contours represent steep slopes, while widely spaced contours indicate slight differences in elevation. The emphasis is on representing differences, irregularities, and complexities while not ignoring consistencies and similarities. With this image as a guide, the researcher becomes aware that in entering the terrain of white ethnicity, what
