Framing a Book Project, Bringing into Conversation Italian American and Greek American Studies

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Transcultural Encounters, Comparative Inquiries:  Italian Americans and Greek Americans

This volume contributes to American ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies. The aim is to move beyond the “single group approach,” which privileges the study of ethnic singularity, to explore these two groups in relation to each other. We propose to bring into focus cross-cultural interfaces and to inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. 


Our book project contributes to these developments from a particular angle, namely transcultural and comparative scholarship. We are interested in promoting the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. 


Two perspectives organize this volume: First, we are interested in exploring Greek and Italian U.S. transcultural encounters. Italian Americans and Greek Americans have lived in the same neighborhoods, worked in the same workplaces, loved each other, married with each other, participated in labor strikes together. They play music together. Did they find inspiration in each other’s cultural expressions? What do we know about the fields of their interactions? They have certainly been classified under the same rubric as “white ethnics,” Michael Novak’s infamous PIGS (Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs), an ideological construction which was pivotal in the identity politics of the 1970s. But how did Italian American and Greek American lives intersect in everyday social life? How did they negotiate their mobility to the suburbs in relation to each other?


Second, we adopt a comparative perspective so that the practices of one ethnic group will illuminate the other, and vice versa. Both groups have built robust religious and various educational institutions. In what ways their adaptations and cultural expressions are similar, and in what ways are they different in specific contexts? How do we account for the similarities and differences? How have they been representing themselves, and in what manner have they negotiated representations of their identities construed by Others? All-in-all, in what ways did Italian American and Greek American histories and experiences converge or diverge?


Taking cues from concepts such as contact zones and borderlands, we are interested in understanding the social dynamic–processes involving negotiation, conflict, cooperation, solidarity, love, cultural exchanges–that have marked these encounters. We are interested in identifying differences, similarities, and intersections across the historical experiences of these groups. We wish to map specific encounters and comparisons to find out what they tell us about American society as a transcultural terrain.


In addition, our proposed book contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. Our contributors will be reflecting on the practice of transcultural and comparative analysis they employ, and will be generating insights based on that analysis.


This proposed book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, film studies as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as popular culture, both visual (Kojak, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck) and “low brow” crime fiction (Domenic Stansberry and George Pelecanos). It includes analysis of literature (Annie Liontas/Paola Corso; Elia Kazan, Eleni Sikelianos, Jeffrey Eugenides/Gay Talese, Gregory Corso, John Fante). It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories (Australia, United States), translocal interconnections (Newark, NJ), the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. Although there have been a couple of books comparing European American ethnic and immigrant groups, notably in labor history and literature, this volume is the first of its kind, as far we can tell, for initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

This book then brings to the fore nationally recognized cultural texts, authors and artistic expression as well as lesser known texts and histories that mostly circulate in ethnic and diaspora contexts. Brought in transcultural relation and juxtaposition to each other, both visible and less visible cultural products widen our understanding of Italian and Greek ethnicities and the ways in which they negotiate their cultural presence in American culture via self-representation and engage with representations of their identity by Others. 

Written in a non-specialized language accessible to the general public, Transcultural Encounters, Comparative Inquiries: Italian Americans and Greek Americans is a book of interest to a wide range of publics: scholars in various academic fields, including American studies, ethnic studies, and diaspora studies. It will speak to Greek Americans and Italian Americans. It will also resonate with readers in Greece and Italy, who are increasingly interested in their diasporas. The book helps imagine new College courses in intra-ethnic European Americans, and new trajectories in European American scholarship. It is positioned to serve as a reference point in future discussion of transcultural and comparative ethnic studies.


This conversation is necessary for several reasons, one certainly in the context of a wider academic discourse that often tends to undervalue the study of European Americans. Seen as tenuously holding on to surface identities and largely assimilated into “whiteness,” Italian Americans and Greek Americans have been marginalized by a significant thread in the American academy. Italian American and Greek American studies have certainly been effective, the former more so than the latter, in bringing into focus the vibrant cultural production of their respective ethnic groups. Indeed, one might speak about a proliferation of research on food, community history, diaspora affiliations, transnational connections, literature and popular culture among others. Scholars have responded to the devaluation of their subject matter by performing its value. They bring to the fore the arts, cultural expressivity, and histories of these two groups, demonstrating how Italian and Greek American ethnicities keep shaping American society and their respective historical homelands.


This is rarely practiced in the scholarship of European Americans. We seek, as we mentioned, to initiate a broader conversation that moves beyond seeing ethnicity as singularity. In this move we come closer to ethnographic and historical realities where immigrants and individuals with hyphenated identities do not live insular lives, or negotiate solely in relation with American culture. They interact, collaborate, clash, and affiliate with each other in various modes and degrees. This fertile transcultural field merits that we place it at the center of analysis. The aim is to illuminate new and unexpected facets of Greek- and Italian ethnicity in the United States.

Yiorgos Anagnostou

For a volume to be co-edited by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Theodora Patrona

Giannis Antetokounmpo

Giannis is mobilizing a community, we are witnessing the performance of U.S. Greek identity in a place and scale that was probably thought unlikely outside festivals and parades: the NBA arena. If the fostering of ethnic identity in children requires some kind of identification with a positive role model, Yannis delivers just that. But he reinforces Greek identity beyond biology (ethnicity) contributing to a sense of post-ethnic Greek American identity.

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/22339864/greece-appreciates-giannis-antetokounmpo

Louis Tikas: Cretan and Greek Identities in Poetry and History

For some time now I have been working on a book chapter that explores the ways in which David Mason’s narrative poem Ludlow: A Verse-Novel (2007) fictionalizes Louis Tikas, an immigrant from Crete and a union organizer, who was brutally murdered in 1914 during the labor strike at Ludlow, Colorado. As a narrative that intertwines poetry with history, Ludlow prompted me to undertake extensive research on the cultural and political context that shaped the trajectory of Tikas’s real life, both in Crete where he was born as Ilias Anastasios Spantidakis in 1886, and his early years in the United States, where he immigrated in 1906, before joining the Union late in 1912. Given the scarcity of the archive, research on the context within which Tikas negotiated his identities presents itself as one of the few available routes scholars have in the effort to understand Tikas’s pre-American life. I did so of course with Zeese Papanikolas’s (1982) pioneering work on this topic as a compass. I have now completed the work, tentatively entitled “Poetry Traversing History: The Making of Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow.” It is forthcoming in a volume exploring intersections between poetry and history.

In this posting I share research that was left out from the soon-to-be published work. It is about a question that I sought to answer regarding Tikas’s Cretan and Greek identities. Given the power of regionalism in the Greek-speaking worlds of the 19th century and its antagonism with Greek national culture, I needed to understand how Tikas might have negotiated this set of identities. In what follows I closely read the poem’s evocation of Tikas’s regional and pre-American identities in relation to the available evidence regarding his practice of identity as well as the cultural discourses that defined these identities at the time. I observe that Ludlow’s poetic evocation of Tikas produces a historically and sociologically credible reconstruction: A co-existence between his Cretan and Greek identities.
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Writing about the regional identities of U.S. Greek immigrants in the early 20th century, historian Yannis Papadopoulos (2010) notes that for populations from areas outside the Greek kingdom at the time, “attachment to Greek state institutions and solidarity with Greeks from other provinces of Greece and the Ottoman empire were not self-evident” (14):

"The Greek- or Turkish-speaking Orthodox emigrants from Asia Minor and Thrace did notnecessarily identify themselves with the irredentist policy of the Greek state. Greek diplomats considered the immigration experience to be a way for immigrants to assimilate the dominant discourse of the “Great Idea” through social intercourse with Greeks from mainland Greece'' (13–14).

Does this situation apply to the historical Tikas? Not necessarily. Oral accounts–the best evidence in our possession–attest to his Greek national identification prior to his emigration in the United States. Local memory places the nineteen-year old Tikas wrapped up in national fervor and participating in the 1905 local revolt against the Great powers protecting the island’s autonomy from the Ottoman empire (1898) and toward Crete’s unification with Greece. This constitutes an expression of political activism contributing to his reputation in the village “as a guerrilla fighter” (Papanikolas 1982: 262). These accounts cannot be readily discounted, given the robust operation of Greek nationalism on the island throughout the nineteenth century, as I will show later in the discussion. Ludlow registers this act of national identification during the revolt–an identification that performs Tikas’ Greek identity–and further follows speculations that have this figure joining the national fervor sweeping Greek immigrants on the occasion of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913): “It is hard to think of that ardent young man, Louis Tikas, not being in the crowd that cheered the special [train] going east,” Papanikolas writes (44). (fn.1) The poem echoes this sentiment: “He joined those marching in the big parade/who would stay behind but wished their brothers well,” (53). The historian and the poet are in tandem in recognizing the power of nationalism to shape this historical figure.

Let us turn to Tikas’s regional identity. The poem unequivocally underlines the solidity of his Cretan filiation under conditions of migrancy. Early on in the narrative, it posits the power of the natal village as a source of deep belonging: “home was Loutra, poverty, the house, the olive press, his father serving coffee” (Mason 2007, 47). The speaker has Tikas assert a primary identification with the culture of his early childhood socialization: the Cretan dialect, the family’s agrarian and small shop economy. This is sound, sociologically. It is the habitus of local culture, in other words the “system of durable” predispositions” that structures deep attachment to a place and social practice (Bourdieu 1977: 72). The poem construes Tikas via the sociological recognition of the power of habitus as a mode of enduring belonging. Tikas’s cultural past enters the American present in a moment of personal crisis. When confronted with alienating roles and rules associated with Americanization, the speaker construes Tikas seeking solace in the intimacy of the internalized familial and local identifications. The enduring diasporic identification lies with the embodied habitus of the regional.

Particularly visible in the archive is what appears as a marker of regional affiliation. There are images of and eye witness accounts about Tikas sporting the traditional costume of Crete. This is what he opted to wear in the highly symbolic photograph he posed for before emigrating to the United States in 1906. But was he wearing it during everyday activities as well, an ordinary practice that reflected habitual usage instead of a conscious display of identity? This is also the costume he would keep wearing during the strike, “among the Ludlow tents on holidays,” before the flames in the camp erased it from the record (Papanikolas 1982: 266). In the multiethnic camp that costume would have been seen as a marker of difference, certainly a meaningful connection with the pre-American past.

Tikas’s powerful regional identification presents a tantalizing route of inquiry. Is it possible perhaps that his attachment to rural Crete placed him in an antagonistic relation with national culture, imposed by the Greek state during the island’s period of autonomy (1898-1913)? The vast cultural distance between the local vernacular and the official national, coupled with Cretans’ well-documented animosity toward state-imposed bureaucracy could have ruptured Tikas’s national identity as Greek. Lack of identification with national culture coupled with active resistance against it, would have rendered him a lesser Greek, a Greek in fact, if we follow national stereotypes, whose vernacular culture exhibited tainted proximity with Ottoman elements (Herzfeld 1999), as I will explain. Is this possible lack of identification with the national what informs the poet’s decision to render Tikas as partially Greek? To explore this further let us take a close look at the multitude of contradictory social worlds that enmeshed Cretan life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The clash between the state-sponsored national culture and regional social practices at the time of Tikas’s upbringing–a time of dramatic political and cultural flux–helps us situate this historical plausibility. Modernization in Greece, Gregory Jusdanis writes, “entails the formation of a national culture to replace the ethnoreligious identities of the stratified system” (1991: 49). “The introduction of the European model” of national uniformity from above “led to ideological turmoil that polarized Greek culture along a series of antimonies” (43), including the one between modernity and tradition. As a result, the national and the regional clashed. As a result, the national and the regional clashed. Dimitris Tziovas shows that national culture represented the centripetal forces of “modernization, Europeanization, and standardization” (1994: 104). It was generated by an elite in the context of forming a capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic society, and was disseminated through the institutional mechanisms of education, the army, and the jurisprudence. Social cohesion was seen as a function of cultural and linguistic uniformity. Regional identity, on the other hand, represented the centrifugal forces of “customary law, communalism, regionalism, and linguistic plurality” (104). Social cohesion was sought through interpersonal and familial obligations, local values, and customary law in a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial setting. The national and the regional represent two cultural worlds at odds with each other and therefore antagonistic in the context of nation building. The historicity of Ludlow’s claim on Tikas’s Greek identity lies in this tension between the national and the regional. From this macro-perspective, one could pose the reasonable hypothesis that Tikas–as a subject who is embedded regionally–could be seen as “almost a Greek” from the point of view of modernizers; as someone who represents the centrifugal presence that counters the homogenizing orientation of national culture. Because Crete was a province of the Ottoman empire until 1898, Tikas was not subjected early on in his life to the full range of the social mechanisms that the Greek state deployed to instill national culture within the kingdom. Still, parallel to the pull of the local, he must have been subjected to Greek nationalism hailing Cretans to identify with the nation. He must have been institutionally, at least, exposed to the ideology of Greek national identity, as the Greek state’s “national educational networks” (Şenişik, 2011: 57)–schools, consuls, patriotic organizations–were an integral part of Ottoman Crete–including rural areas– in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cretan-born teachers, educated at the University of Athens, were the primary agents of cultivating national consciousness among rural Christian peasantry, in “new elementary Christian schools” (46) appearing throughout the Cretan countryside. This could explain why the speaker has Tikas denounce a Roman/romios identity. The nation was transforming the Orthodox Christians subjects of the Rum millet into ethnoreligious, Greek Orthodox national subjects shifting the primary identification and loyalty of these populations from Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul toward the Greek kingdom and the nationalized Orthodox Church of Greece.

Still, the scale of experiential identification weighted more on the side of the regional than on the national. The considerable distance between national culture (the high register idiom of the purified language, bureaucratic and capitalist relations, modernization) and the regional one (linguistic vernacular, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial interpersonal relations) posed several borderlines which marked the distance between the local and the Europeanized national, a dramatic cultural gap which in the eyes of the westernized elite would have rendered Cretan “folk” less than “European Greek,” “almost Greeks.” Contemporary Athenians, Herzfeld notes, “are often quick to condemn what they see as an endemic Cretan proclivity for violence, and attribute it to the island’s long occupation by the Ottoman Empire” (2003: 284). They have been seen by many “Greeks as a hopelessly mixed and tainted population (284 my emphasis). Would Tikas have been similarly viewed as a “lesser Greek” by mainland Greeks?

But when the question comes to the historical Tikas’ own self-identification, a reconciliation between the regional and national identification could apply as a sound historical plausibility. It is indeed feasible once we examine it through the lenses of ethnohistory in the context of the clash between the regional and the national. The implementation of the legal system of the Greek metropolitan center to the island during its period of autonomy (1898-1913) provides evidence of how Westernization in jurisprudence introduced new legal practices in direct collision with local social practices. In his study of property transfer documents in the town of Rethymnos, in 1900, Michael Herzfeld brings to our attention the sharp disjuncture between the town’s social and moral universe and the cultural orientation of the Greek (European-derived) laws when comparing the latter with the island’s pre-autonomy Ottoman legal codes. Greek law introduced far reaching changes, beyond the expected linguistic ones. The laws were written in the high registered, purist Greek–a “super-purist legalese that was already the bane of the metropolitan center” (1999: 224)–at a time when Cretans “spoke the local form of Greek by preference” (227). Herzfeld shows how the property documents expressed a new bureaucratic ethos, a high degree of precision that was in odds with Ottoman law but also, crucially, from the way locals, both Christians and Muslims, at the time made sense of place, identity, and economic transactions. The Greek code, for instance, required information about the place of residence and the identity of the property owner illustrates this disjunction. Whereas the neighborhood was the local category of reference to orient oneself in the town’s spatial geography, it was now the locally alien address and number of a residence that legal documents utilized to regulate that geography. The local “ethos of imprecision” (235) was supplemented with the bureaucratic innovation of detailed and specific information. The impact of this innovation, Herzfeld shows, introduced a rupture on the ordinary social practices and the moral and economic ethos attached to them in the region, an ethos which Ottoman legal documents came closer in recognizing. Herzfeld aptly condenses the cultural gap between the regional and the externally imposed national:

"Ottoman documentation had not departed significantly from popular usage: the use of patronymics and andronymics as sufficient qualifying marks of personal identification, the naming of neighbours to determine the boundaries of real estate and the absence of a detailed prior history as a precondition for the recognition of current ownership (and hence the right to sell) are all features of the everyday, informal management of property relations to this day" (226).

How did the local Cretan Christians feel about this state-driven imposition? We will never know with absolute certainty. It is instructive at this point to take heed from Herzfeld’s allowing in the context of his discussion for “sceptical application of presentism” (236)–the cautious evocation of the present to project a relative understanding of the past–in the specific context of reading these property documents. Skeptical presentism presents itself as the best option we have to at our disposal to reliably reconstruct Tikas under the circumstances of a scarce archive.

Given the well-established Cretan hostility, even resistance, to external cultural impositions, including those by the Greek state, throughout history, it is most plausible–almost certain–that the islanders resented and attempted to undermine the new laws. Still, following Herzfeld, they may have also opted to strategically manipulate it to serve their own interests, particularly at a time when property document transfers were of particular significance in the midst of major population displacements, namely the fleeing of Cretan Muslims from the island. We must also take into account that resistance to the Greek legal practices did not mean repudiation of Greek national identity. At the rhetorical level today, the opposition to the state does not compromise loyalty “to the conceptual unity of the Greek nation” (1985: 19). Opposition to the bureaucratic state underlines an ethos of independence against state-imposed rule and buttresses the claim of the Cretans’ self-professed “moral excellence above all other Greeks.” In this rhetoric, aggressive traditionalism and regional pride for the island’s uniqueness subordinate themselves to the national while at the same time positing the local as the moral exemplar of the nation, positing the moral superiority of the local and the regional; making Cretans more Greek than mainland Greeks. This seeming paradox, the co-existence of strong localism and powerful national identity, in fact represents the power of nationalism to reconcile the two in the “integrative project of nationhood,” a project of particular urgency for nation-building in the area (Herzfeld 2003: 296). “Island intellectuals and peasants alike,” Herzfeld writes, “aggressively claim cultural uniqueness for Crete, which nevertheless remains firmly attached in their writings and in everyday stereotypes to the premise of its transcendent Greekness” (283).

Notably, as I have shown, the historical Tikas identified with the national cause calling for the island’s unification with the Greece at a time when cultural modernization was making inroads in the island. Though it is almost impossible to know how his family and him personally negotiated the importation of national culture, the latter did not deter him from identifying with the nation. It is not historically unlikely, following skeptical presentism, that Tikas followed the concentric model of identity, a model of powerful endurance in the island’s history. Opposition to the bureaucratic state does not preclude “an essentially segmentary view of the world” (Herzfeld 1985: xii), which accommodates a simultaneous village, regional, and national identity. Based on this logic, the clashing encounter between the local and the national in the formatting years of the autonomy period did not seemingly cast doubt in Tikas’s national self-definition. It did not necessarily make him feel less Greek.

Notes

1. An estimated 20,000 “Greeks from the United States went back to fight in the Balkan Wars” (Georgakas 1987: 22).


Works Cited

Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Georgakas, Dan. 1987. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, XIV (1&2): 5–53.


Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton University Press.


-----------------. 1999. “Of Language and Land Tenure. The Transmission of Property and Information in Autonomous Crete.” Social Anthropology October Vol. 7(3): 223–237.


-----------------. 2003. “Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections.” Comparative Studies in Society and History April 45(2): 281–310.


Jusdanis Gregory. 1991. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.


Mason, David. 2007. Ludlow: A Verse-Novel. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press.


Papadopoulos, Yannis G.S. 2010. “The Role of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Shaping Greek American Identity, 1890–1927: A Historical Analysis.” In Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Assaad E. Azzi, Xenia Chryssochoou, Bert Klandermans, Bernd Simon, eds., 9–31. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.


Papanikolas, Zeese. 1982. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Foreword by Wallace Stegner. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.


Şenişik, Pinar. 2011. The Transformation of Ottoman Crete: Revolts, Politics and Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century. I.B. Tauris.

Greek American Resource Portal–2017 Update

Compiled by Yiorgos Anagnostou

Dissertations and Theses

Karpathakis Anna. 1993. Sojourners and Settlers, Greek Immigrants of Astoria, New York. Ph.D. Dissertation. New York City, Columbia University.

Soumakis, Fevronia K. 2015. A Sacred Paideia: The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, Immigration, and Education in New York City, 1959–1979. PhD Dissertation, Teachers College.

This dissertation examines the role the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America played in shaping Greek education in New York City during the period 1959-1979. Beginning in 1959, when Archbishop Iakovos was appointed as the fourth Archbishop by the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Archdiocese focused its attention on expanding and modernizing educational institutions. The Archbishop advocated for a “resurrection of a Greek Orthodox consciousness” in education that would instill knowledge of the Greek language, as well as the historical, cultural, and religious legacy of the Greek Orthodox nation. As parish communities in New York City and the new wave of Greek immigrants heeded the call to build and expand parochial schools over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the Archdiocese’s Department of Education also sought to modernize its curriculum and books, in addition to the challenging task of upgrading the teacher training program at St. Basil’s Academy. Modernization, however, did not entail assimilation and a diminishing of Hellenism, but a renewal of a Hellenic Orthodox identity within a religiously and ethnically pluralistic society. In part, several factors influenced the educational agenda of the Archdiocese: the historical position of the Church in relation to education, the needs of the new immigrants within the broader context of Greek Americans in the US, and the politics of Greece in relation to Cyprus and Turkey. This study ends in 1979 when shifts in demographics, declining enrollments, and competition with public schools compelled the Archdiocese and parish communities to reassess the future of their educational programs. This work weaves the Greek American immigrant experience into the broader narrative of immigration to New York in the post-1965 period. A more complex and dynamic portrait of Greek American education in New York emerges as well as the central role played by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. The insights from this work contribute the Greek American educational experience to the larger body of scholarship on the history of education in the United States.

Ψαρρής, Θωμάς Α., 2015. «Από τη διασπορά στη «diaspora»: ο ελληνισμός της Αμερικής και ο ρόλος του στη διαμόρφωση της αμερικανικής εξωτερικής πολιτικής από το 1975 μέχρι σήμερα.» [From the greek word 'διασπορά' to 'diaspora': the Greeks living in America and their role in the formation of the American foreign policy from 1975 till the present day]. Διπλωματική εργασία - Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο. Τμήμα Διεθνών και Ευρωπαϊκών Σπουδών [http://pandemos.panteion.gr/index.php?op=record&type=0&q=%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%AC&page=1&scope=0&lang=el&pid=iid:14079].

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι να καταδείξει τη συνδρομή της ελληνικής διασποράς στη διαμόρφωση της αμερικανικής εξωτερικής πολιτικής, όσον αφορά τα ελληνικά ζητήματα, μετά το 1975 και τελικά, φτάνοντας στο σήμερα, κατά πόσο θα εξακολουθήσει να επηρεάζει τη διαμόρφωση της στο μέλλον, δεδομένο ότι διάφοροι παράγοντες, που σχετίζονται με την ομογένεια, έχουν χαλιναγωγήσει τη δράση της και αναστείλει την πορεία της.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to show the contribution of the Greeks living in America in the formation of the American foreign policy as far as the Greek issues after 1975 are concerned. Furthermore, it aims at highlighting whether the foreign policy of America will continue to be influenced in the future since a variety of factors that have to do with the Americans of Greek descent have manipulated its action and suspended its course.

Documentary

a) Documentaries

Ludlow: Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War [Ludlow, Οι Έλληνες στους Πολέμους του Άνθρακα]. 2016. Leonidas Vardaros Director, Frosso Tsouka Researcher. Apostolis Berbedes Non-Profit. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5865450/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

Film

Journal of Modern Hellenism, Special issue

• Georgakas, Dan. 2016. “Introduction.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 1–3.

• Saltz, Barbara. 2016. “The Greek American Image in American Film: Creation of a Filmography.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 4–10.

• Georgakas, Dan. 2016. “From ‘Other’ to ‘One of Us’: The Changing Image of Greek Americans in American Film: 1943-1963.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32.11-30.

• Katsan, Gerasimus. 2016. “The Hollywood Films of Irene Papas.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 31–44.

• Giallelis, Stathis. 2016. “Before and Beyond America America.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 45–53.

• Thomopoulos, Elaine. 2016. “And the Winner is Olympia Dukakis.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 54–65.

• Kalogeras, Yiorgos. 2016. “Working Through and Against Convention: The Hollywood Carer of A.I. Bezzerides.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 66–81.

• Yiannias James Vicki. 2016. Creating Images for Hollywood Classics. Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 82–95.

• Lagos G. Taso. 2016. “Forgotten Movie Theater Pioneer: Alexander Pantages and Immigrant Hollywood.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 96–114.

• Karalis Vrasidas. 2016. “John Cassavetes and the Uneasy Conformism of the American Middle Class.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 115–128.

• Jacques, Geoffrey. 2016. “Promises, Trust, Betrayal: The Art of Elia Kazan.” Journal of Modern Hellenism 32. 129–157.

d) Film Reviews

Kalogeropoulos, Householder. 2009. My Life in Ruins. Hellenic Communication Service. June 18. http://www.helleniccomserve.com/mylifeinruins.html.

Folklore

Kaliambou, Maria. 2016. Oi ekdoseis ton Karpathion metanaston stin Ameriki. [Publications by Karpathian immigrants in America]. Karpathos and Folklore. Fourth International Congress of Karpathian Folklore (Karpathos, May 8-12, 2013), Athens. Pp. 425–442 (in Greek).

Globalization, Transnationalism, Diaspora

Roudometof, Victor and Anna Karpathakis. 2002. “Greek Americans and Transnationalism: Religion, Class and Community.” Communities Across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures. Eds. Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof, 41­­­­–54. London: Routledge.

b) Reviews

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2017. Review of Anastasia Christou and Russell King, Counter-Diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns “Home.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (2014). Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 35.1 (Spring): 252–57.

Kitroeff, Alexander. 2016. Review of Λίνα Βεντούρα και Λάμπρος Μπαλτσιώτης, editors, Το έθνος πέρα των συνόρων: «Ομογενειακές» πολιτικές του ελληνικού κράτους

Greek American Canon

Saloutos, Theodore. 1964. The Greeks in the United States. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

Greek American Studies

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2017. “The Transformation of Greek America.” Bridge. March 9. https://bridge.fairead.net/anagnostou-transformation.

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2017. “Building Bridges, Probing Intersections.” Bridge. February 18. https://bridge.fairead.net/anagnostou-building-bridges

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2016. On Greek America, Greek American Studies and the Diasporic Perspective as Syncretism and Hybridity. Rethinking Greece. August 1.
http://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/index.php/interviews/rethinking-greece/6104-rethiniking-greece-yiorgos-anagnostou-on-greek-america,-greek-american-studies-and-the-diasporic-prspctive-as-syncretism-and-hybridity

Greek Orthodoxy

Karpathakis, Anna. 1994. “‘Whose Church is it Anyway?’ Greek Immigrants of Astoria, New York and their Church.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 20 (1): 97–122.

Matsoukas, George. 2008. “A Church in Captivity: The Greek Orthodox Church of America.” iUniverse.

It is a disconcerting fact that decisions for Orthodox Christians living in North America are currently dictated by interests of foreign governments and patriarchates, all which contribute to spiritual indifference among the faithful. This collection of essays explores the loss of autonomy and unification within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and offers ways to create an all-encompassing church that respects cultures and philosophies. George Matsoukas, Executive Director of Orthodox Christian Laity in West Palm Beach, Florida and an active member of his local parish, diocese, and archdiocese, chronologically presents personal essays that respond to regression in the life of the church during a seven-year period. He encourages constructive change through effective communication and a partnership between the church and the laity, ultimately resulting in a church that is able to meet the spiritual needs of all its members.

Saloutos, Theodore. 1973. “The Greek Orthodox Church in the United States and Assimilation.” The International Migration Review Winter 7 (4): 395–407.

History

c) History and Historiography Scholarship

Καρπόζηλος, Κωστής. 2016. Κόκκινη Αμερική. Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης.

Identity & Immigration

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2017. “Norms, Vulnerabilities, Paradoxes: Greeks and MTV.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 35(1): 155–179.

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2017. “Citizenship and Entrepreneurship: Greek America as Diaspora at a Time of Crisis,” Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity. Ed. Dimitris Tziovas, 107–132. I.B. Tairus Publishers.

Haddad Ikonomopoulos, Marcia. 2017. “Immigration of Jews from Ioannina to the United States.” AHIF Policy Journal, Volume 8: Spring. https://ahiworld.org/AHIFpolicyjournal/pdfs/Volume8Spring/11_Ikonomopoulos.pdf

The diversity in Greek culture is often ignored when scholars talk about immigration patterns and the nature of the Greek Diaspora. Looking at a specific region illustrates some of the nuances involved in mass immigration.

Καλογεράς, Γιώργος. 2007. «Εθνοτικές γεωγραφίες: Κοινωνικο-πολιτισμικές ταυτίσεις μίας μετανάστευσης.» Κατάρτι.

Petrakis, Leonidas. 2017. “Defending and Advancing Hellenic Values and Interests.” Bridge. March 9. https://bridge.fairead.net/petrakis-defending

Papanikolas, Zeese. 2017. “Confessions of a Hyphenated Greek.” Bridge. March 28.
https://bridge.fairead.net/papanikolas-hyphenated

Lipsitz, George. 2007. “How Johnny Veliotis Became Johnny Otis.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 33(1&2): 81–104.

Language

Anonymous. 2017. “How a Half-Greek Father Taught his Quarter-Greek Daughter to Speak Greek Fairly Fluently in the American Midwest.” Bridge. March 18. https://bridge.fairead.net/half-greek-father

Hantzopoulos, Marina. 2005. “English only? Greek language as currency in Queens, New York City.” Languages, Communities, and Education. (pp. 3-8). Ed. Zeena Zakharia and Tammy Arnstein, 3–8. Society for International Education: Teachers College, Columbia University. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/international-and-transcultural-studies/international-and-comparative-education/student-resources/iedcie-related-student-organizations/SIEVolume3Languages.pdf

Koliussi, Lukia 2004. “Identity Construction in Discourse: Gender Tensions among Greek Americans in Chicago.” In Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City’s Neighborhoods. Ed. by Marcia Farr, 103–106. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Literature and Poetry

c) Poetry

Kindinger, Evangelia. 2015. “Living Separation: Xenitia in Contemporary Poetry of the Greek Diaspora.” Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry. Ed. Cornelia Freitag, 187–207. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Τρούσας, Φώντας. 2016. «Ο Θεοδόσης Άθας είναι ο στιχουργός του “Τζακ Ο’ Χάρα,” που είπε κάποτε ο Ζαμπέτας.» Δεκέμβριος 23. http://www.lifo.gr/articles/music_articles/126592

d) Poetry – Reviews

Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2016. “The Poetics of Diaspora: Greek US Voices.” Review Essay. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 34(1): 161–167.

e) Literature and Poetry Scholarship

Patrona, Theodora D. 2017. Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature. Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Music and Song

Archival resource: Greece Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture, Compiled by Vivy Niotis. [collection of folk songs in Greek America, audios of liturgies] http://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/Greece.html

Oral History

Ottoman Greeks of the United States (OGUS): The Acropolis and the Madonna – A Case Study of Refugee Deportation from the United States. 2017 (January 13th)
http://oral.history.ufl.edu/2017/01/13/ottoman-greeks-of-the-united-states-ogus-the-acropolis-and-the-madonna-a-case-study-of-refugee-deportation-from-the-united-states/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+spohp+%28Samuel+Proctor+Oral+History+Program+-+Podcast%29&utm_content=FeedBurner

Politics and Ethnicity

Lalaki, Despina. 2017. “From Plato to NATO 2,500 Years of Democracy and The End of History.” AHIF Policy Journal, Volume 8: Spring. https://ahiworld.org/AHIFpolicyjournal/pdfs/Volume8Spring/10_Lalaki.pdf

On the occasion of his recent visit to Greece, President Barack Obama’s remarks – protracted echoes of familiar pronouncements about the end of history and ideological evolution, endorsements of laissez-faire economics and the individual freedom that our Western democracies purportedly serve – not unexpectedly were uttered against a background of Doric columns and numerous invocations to the ancients. Appropriately if rather predictably, President Obama drew from history and stressed the strong connections between his country and his host, emphasizing the political culture shared between Greece and the United States. What caught my attention, however, was the American President’s explicit reference to President Truman, whom he briefly quoted from his famous 1947 speech in the Congress, a speech that encapsulated the post-war US foreign policy of containment and became known as the Truman Doctrine.

Politics and Ethnicity

a) Debates (new category)

Greek America and President Elect Donald Trump

• Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2016. Whose Greek America? Chronos #43. 26 November.
https://chronos.fairead.net/election16-anagnostou

• Kitroeff, Alexander. 2016. “There Are Progressive Views Of America; Let Them Be Heard.” Chronos #44. December 5. https://chronos.fairead.net/kitroeff-greek-amerika

• Papanikolas, Zeese. 2016. “Comments on Yiorgos Anagnostou.” Chronos #43. November 30. https://chronos.fairead.net/election16-papanikolas-comments

Blogs and Resource Portals

a) Blogs

STLGreeks. https://stlgreeks.wordpress.com/

This is a blog dedicated to the early history of the Greeks in Saint Louis, MO.