Contours of White Ethnicity : Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America

In Contours of White Ethnicity , Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities. The politics and poetics of popular ethnography: folk immigrant, ethnic, and racial pasts in history and discourse Whither collective ethnic identities? White ethnics and the slippery terrain of European Americanness Whose ethnic community? Gendered pasts and polyphonies of belonging Interrogating ethnic whiteness, building interracial solidarity: popular ethnography as cultural critique Ethnicity as choice? Roots and identity as a narrative project Redirecting ethnic options: historical routes of heritage. Acknowledgments Introduction: Why White Ethnicity? Why Ethnic Pasts? One: The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography Two: Whither Collective Ethnic Identities? Three: Whose Ethnic Community? Four: Interrogating Ethnic Whiteness, Building Interracial Solidarity Five: Ethnicity as Choice? Six: Redirecting Ethnic Options Afterword: White Ethnicity as Cultural Becoming Notes References Index