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 is readily visible from one angle becomes invisible from another perspective; what appears to be a horizontal vista may in fact be punctuated by deep trenches. And one is made mindful that dominant representations of ethnicity may obscure the better point of vantage from which to consider minute features of the landscape. Those who wish to explore the complexity of this terrain must not lose sight of ethnic representations shadowed by dominant discourses.
In this book, I defer my ambition to undertake an inclusive mapping of Greek America’s contours of continuities, discontinuities, junctures, and disjunctures. I discuss here only those contours of the past that my specific interventions guide me to explore. I trace the continuing importance of the Greek classical past as a source of identity, community, and distinction in Greek America. I bring into focus a particular node where this past intersects with nostalgia for the preimmigrant folk and the discourse of New Age beliefs. One contour takes me to a feminist reading of the immigrant past. Another one leads me to consider the appropriation of the vernacular to advocate solidarity between Greek Americans and minorities. I sketch such contours in painstaking detail to show how and why the immigrant pasts that I outlined in this chapter continue to exert a powerful force on contemporary popular ethnographers.
Within this framework, I identify dominant views on ethnicity, contradictions, and contestation. I pay close attention to the incongruities that take shape every time a narrative about ethnic perfection is confronted by a countermemory about ethnic failure. In my mapping I attend to contours that exhibit unexpected twists and turns and intersect at surprising coordinates, having escaped the charting of specialized or amateur topographers. I am interested therefore in recovering ethnicity as a heterogeneous, uneven social field, an interpretive polyphony that is crisscrossed by languages of success and failure, loss and preservation, decline and reconfiguration, historical memory and ahistorical nostalgia, self-affirmation, and self-critique. The next chapter introduces such unanticipated contours. It outlines assimilation as ethnic production—not cultural loss—that simultaneously locates Greek America at the complex, fractal intersection among whiteness, the discourse of heritage, model white ethnicity, collective identity, and European Americanness.
CHAPTER TWO
Whither Collective Ethnic Identities?
White Ethnics and the Slippery Terrain of European Americanness
The twilight [of ethnicity] metaphor also allows for the occasional flare-ups of ethnic feelings and conflicts that give the illusion that ethnicity is reviving, but are little more than flickers in the fading light.
—Richard Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity
From “power feminism” to libertarian gay rights to assertions of “ghetto nihilism,” we are awash in a petit bourgeois politics that simultaneously caresses the better-off female, gay, and/or minority self while consigning its working-class and impoverished sisters and brothers to their “richly deserved” misery, lecturing them, for all the world like some twentieth-century Gradgrind, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
—Micaela di Leonardo, “White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear’s Chair”
WHAT IS HAPPENING to American white ethnicities in the era of multiculturalism? A significant number of scholars tend to think about white ethnicity in apocalyptic terms, writing, if not of its imminent extinction, certainly of its dramatic weakening. Key words such as “atrophy,” “twilight,” “superficiality,” and “thinness” increasingly frame a research perspective that is unwilling to probe beyond the vocabulary of white ethnic cultural decline, the celebratory display of symbols in parades and festivals, forgetting, and the dimming of tradition. White ethnicities are seen as attenuated to such a degree as to become fleeting and shallow. Their communities are portrayed as verging on dissolution, a monumental fragmentation that will lead to the proliferation of an infinite variety of private and tenuous ethnic identities. And the fusion of distinct ethnic identities of Americans of European ancestry into a (white) European American identity is predicted, inevitably diminishing the importance of particular ethnic collectives. Whereas elsewhere in scholarship racial minorities are represented as embodying richly textured cultural lives, white ethnics are made to stand for a transparent people on the verge of losing culture.
The