Greek/American Identifications, Personal Routes

Words, practices, ethos, performances, material culture, rhythms, and rhymes pulling me into affective and political identifications with Greek/America

• Ethos (Devotion, Determination, Hard Work, Writing and Cultural Activism as Vocation)

     Greek American scholars and authors working

     well into their youthful old age contributing to 

     the understanding of Greek America (Thomas

     Doulis, Dan Georgakas, Helen Papanikolas, 

     Harry Mark Petrakis, Elaine Thomopoulos)

• Family

     I never loved my father the way I loved him at

     that moment (a paraphrase, until I locate the

     exact statement)

     [Johnny Otis about his Greek immigrant father

     attending Otis’s wedding ceremony (amidst his

     mother’s resolute opposition) with Phyllis

     Walker, an interracial union.]

• “Folk Heritage”

     “Every argument has a rebuttal (O logos ehei

      antilogo)” [frequent saying by a woman in a

      family connected with Greek/American

      migration, early 1910s] (1)

• Labor

     Immigrant waiters and dishwashers in U.S.

     Greek restaurants

• Memoir / Personal Recollections

     “Unfortunately, the occasional experience of

      even the best of Greek folk life isn’t enough to

      constitute an identity or a way of life. If that 

      was all there was to it, it would have been

      better to get away and leave it all behind as

      many did. …

      One day, when I was in my early teens, I went

      into a bookstore and saw a book entitled The

      Greek Passion sitting next to the cash register.

      It was the first time I’d seen a book with the

      name of a living Greek on it. The clerk told me

      a Greek priest had ordered it but hadn’t come

      to pick it up. Our priest, the only one for all of

      Montana, had died of a heart attack a few

      weeks earlier, so I offered to buy it. It’s hard to

      explain the effect the novel had on me. I was

      actually in contact with a real Greek author,

      someone at least as well educated as the

      people who taught me in school. And the book

      was a lot more interesting and relevant to me

      than most of the literature we were assigned to

      read” (2).

• Music

     “I Rather Set Myself on Fire,” Anna Paidoussi

      and Acroama – at 4:00

• Poetry–Bilingualism–Translation

Poet George Economou performs his translation of Michalis Katsaros' poem “Those you see”/Aftous pou vlepeis.

• Politics of Religion

     “What our struggle for theosis most demands is

     a politics of empathy. What can this look like?

     … In imagining what it is like to be in the body

     of a Black person in the USA, perhaps we can

     see more clearly the structures in place that

     facilitate the inequality among persons. Those

     Orthodox Christians who say that Blacks

     should just “improve their culture” (yes—I’ve

     heard this), do not have a sufficiently

     theological understanding of sin and its

     insidious and lingering social effects. Is it

     really that easy, as an example, to will a better

     life for those who find themselves judged

     unemployable for a job or unworthy of a

     promotion because of their skin color–much as

     some Orthodox Christians in a not so distant

     past?” (3).

• Scholarship

     “Good literature requires good criticism, which

     combines an appreciative grasp of an author’s

     gift with a critical understanding of its effects

     on readers and a probing eye for what lies

     beyond” (4).

• Translation

     “First the shipyards in New York gave way, fell

     to their knees and dragged into their effluence

     two and a half thousand workers, the books

     couldn’t be balanced unless new orders came

     in, and whatever the wartime industry had built

     with zeal during those years of conflict and

     unrest was quickly destroyed by the popular

     demand for a new world, a better, more

     peaceful world, and a year or two later, after

     Nixon assumed the reins of power, the RCA

     Victor plant closed, too, and that music-loving

     terrier set its sights on Mexico and cheap labor,

     with management blaming the unions, which

     had been on indefinite strike seeking better 

     wages, and the unions blaming management for

     putting profits above everything else, and the

     whole city was left bereft of jobs, five thousand

     people fired in a single week in a city of ninety

     thousand, and thus in the mid-70s the diner that

     had been renamed 'Ariadne,' with the name

     Mickievitch still visible underneath, and the

     off-white columns painted above the colorful 

     Greek Salad and the mouthwatering Gyro

     Plate, stopped being what it was and promised

     to be, as the decline in free enterprise and the

     continuing war in Vietnam drove the city into

     crisis and residents in the jumble of

     neighborhoods became distrustful, and

     whoever remained in the recently thriving city

     moved to the burgeoning suburbs, first the

     Jews, then the Italians and Greeks, while her

     parents, her very own parents, remained

     immutably optimistic, and in their optimism

     immutably unmoving, sunk their heels in like

     mules and watched as their savings blew away
     on the wind, and their dreams vanished once

     and for all” (5)

• Writing

     “Or so the oppressive elements in Greek and

     Greek American circles would have me

     believe. For in fact I have much more—as a

     Greek, a Greek with the gift of an education, I

     have great riches, and access to a long tradition

     of Greekness that has a very colorful history of

     gender dualism and hybridity, one that was

     eliminated from the tired single story. What I

     do not have is the right to cede to nationalists,

     and to essentialist discourses, all power over

     what it means to be Greek. It is my

     responsibility to help keep alive the memory of

     that richness, keep the definition of Greekness

     wide.” (6)

• Photography

     Spaces of Greek America, by ARC,

• Material Culture

     Louis Tikas, in Colorado

Sources

(1) Efthalia Makris Walsh. 2000. Beloved Sister: Biography Of A Greek-American Family, Letters From The Homeland, 1930-1948. Tegea Press. P. 43.

(2) E. D. Karampetsos. 2005. “Preface.” Charioteer: An Annual Review of Modern Greek Culture, Special issue, The Greek American Experience, Guest Editor, E. D. Karampetsos, No. 43: 5–8.

(3) Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Racism: An Orthodox Perspective,” Public Orthodoxy, January 18, 2018, accessed March 5, 2018,

(4) Artemis Leontis. 2003. “‘What Will I Have to Remember?’ Helen Papanikolas’s Art of Telling.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora Vol. 29 (2), 25.

(5) Karen Emmerich. 2017. Excerpts from the novel Dendrites [by Kallia Papadaki]. 28 December. Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters.

(6) Joanna Eleftheriou. 2019. “Black Stone.” 25 August. Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters.

Περί Διασπορικής Ετερογένειας: ΄Ενα Ελληνοαμερικανικό Παράδειγμα

(Το παράδειγμα αυτό προσφέρεται ως παράθεμα στα πλαίσια ενός ευρύτερου άρθρου μου για το θέμα της διασποράς, υπό δημοσίευση.)

Εμπειρικές μελέτες καταδεικνύουν ότι η διασπορά αποτελεί ένα ετερογενές κοινωνικό πεδίο. Αναγνωρίζεται σαν ένα πεδίο δράσης όπου οι ταυτότητες δημιουργούνται σε συνάρτηση με διάφορες (ταξικές, έμφυλες, πολιτιστικές) συνιστώσες. Στην μεθόριο των απεργιακών κινητοποιήσεων στην Αμερικανική Δύση στις αρχές του εικοστού αιώνα για παράδειγμα, βιομηχανικοί μετανάστες-εργάτες από την νοτιοανατολική Ευρώπη βιώνουν την καπιταλιστική εκμετάλλευση στο μεδούλι τους και μυούνται στην ιδεολογία του ταξικού αγώνα, επιτελώντας την μετάβαση από τον αγροτικό γενέθλιο χώρο στην Αμερικανική βιομηχανική νεοτερικότητα. Γίνονται Αμερικανοί με ένα συγκριμένο τρόπο: συναντούν και υιοθετούν τις αρχές και πρακτικές του Αμερικανικού εργατικού κινήματος. Μαθαίνουν να αγαπούν το μπέιζμπολ. Αλλάζουν κάποιες προγονικές συνήθειες ενώ διατηρούν άλλες. Έλληνες μετανάστες εργάτες αναγνωρίζουν αυτές τις μεταβάσεις, και διαμορφώνονται ως Ελληνοαμερικανοί, το οποίο και δηλώνουν (1).

Ταυτόχρονα, Έλληνες μετανάστες επιχειρηματίες της ίδιας περιόδου παίρνουν αποστάσεις από την εργατικά προσδιορισμένη Ελληνοαμερικανική ταυτότητα, και την στιγματίζουν δημόσια. Ακολουθούν ένα εναλλακτικό μοντέλο Αμερικανοποίησης, αυτό της μεσαίας τάξης, που έρχεται σε άμεση σύγκρουση με τα συμφέροντα των εργατών. Σε μία περίοδο όταν οι συνδυαστικές ταυτότητες που ευθέως ανακαλούν την χώρα καταγωγής των μεταναστών (Greek American) θεωρούνται ένδειξη αντιαμερικανισμού, ένα τμήμα της μεσοαστικής τάξης δημιουργεί μια νέα ταυτότητα (American Hellenic) που θέτει σαν κυρίαρχο σημείο διασπορικής ταύτισης την αρχαία Ελλάδα, η οποία αποτελεί και Αμερικανικό ιδεώδες. Τονίζουν έτσι την συμβατότητα του Ελληνικού και του Αμερικανικού σύμφωνα με τις επιταγές του κυρίαρχου αφηγήματος της αφομοίωσης και τα μετασχηματιστικά πλέγματα εξουσίας που θέτει σε κίνηση.

Το παραπάνω παράδειγμα απεικονίζει εμπειρικά δύο συσχετιζόμενες διαδικασίες:

(1) Η διασπορά συνδέεται με την δημιουργία νέων ταυτοτήτων σε διαπραγμάτευση με ιστορικά προσδιορισμένες ζώνες επαφής.

(2) Η παραπάνω επιτέλεση δεν πραγματοποιείται με τον ίδιο τρόπο για το σύνολο της διασποράς. Οι νέες ταυτότητες διαμεσολαβούνται από την ταξική θέση των εμπλεκομένων καθώς και τα όρια ταύτισης που επιτρέπουν κυρίαρχα αφηγήματα στην χώρα υποδοχής. Το Αμερικανικό εργατικό κίνημα και η πίεση για ολική αφομοίωση προσδιορίζουν αντίστοιχα την δημιουργία δύο τουλάχιστον αναδυομένων και αντιμαχόμενων ελληνικών ταυτοτήτων κατά την ιστορική περίοδο που αναφέρθηκα και μέσω των πλεγμάτων εξουσίας που την διαπερνούν. Η εσωτερική διαφοροποίηση είναι το σαφές αποτέλεσμα.

Να θέσω αυτές τις διαδικασίες σε ευρύτερο πλαίσιο: η ταξική, έμφυλη, σεξουαλική και άλλες πολιτικές θέσεις διασπορικών υποκειμένων οδηγούν σε διαφορετικές συνδυαστικές ταυτότητες συμβάλλοντας σε περαιτέρω εσωτερική διαφοροποίηση και ιδεολογικά ρήγματα μέσα στους κόλπους της διασποράς. Η μεθοριακή κατάσταση καθιστά την διασπορά όχι με όρους ομογένειας αλλά όρους ετερογένειας.

Γιώργος Αναγνώστου

Note

1. Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2019. “Poetry Traversing History: Narrating Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow.” In Retelling the Past in Contemporarty Greek Literature, Film and Popular Culture. Gerasimus Katsan and Trine Willert eds., 49–66. Lexington Press.

About "Ergon: A Journal about Greek/American Culture"

“Years in the village. My father in America. Not sharing the mornings, the mountains, / the rose bush, the air. Moving past the yellow hills, the blue, the almond blossoms, / separately, in separate countries.” Written by Tryfon Tolides, an award-winning poet, the narrative verses above evoke the fragmentation of a family that immigration may bring about. The father is no longer present in the everyday routines of the family. Not being a part of village life and the surrounding landscape either, his absence looms large. His separation creates a void. He is nowhere to be seen in the midst of rose bush, the yellow hills, and in the background of the blue. His departure creates a drab emptiness, which the poet contrasts dramatically with a landscape filled with colors.

Immigration deeply affects individuals and families, those who leave and those who stay behind. It is an experience of new beginnings, difficult adjustments, filled with longing and anticipation. It is about growing roots as well as building institutions. For the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants, life also presents various challenges. Navigating two worlds, two languages, and two cultures is a common experience for the second generation. Immigration and ethnicity entail complex, often life-defining experiences. Not surprisingly, individuals, like Tolides, often resort to poetry, literature, film, photography, and scholarship to tell their stories, to make sense of the experience, to share it with others, to document it.

In order to convey this literary and cultural experience of immigration and diaspora, I launched almost a year ago, in October 2017, Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, an online, free access journal. I wanted to share with readers news about and analysis of the latest documentaries, films, museum exhibits, or books about Greek America. I invited authors, photographers, and scholars to tell their stories. I encouraged scholars to write about the political and cultural relations between the United States and Greece. I wrote about available archives and shared information about resources where readers can learn about Greek American history and culture.

Ergon is a forum that brings together poetry, literature, interviews, film, photography, book reviews and scholarly analysis written in a manner that is accessible to non-academic audiences. Because this kind of venue was absent, I felt it was my responsibility as an educator to create one so that I could make this knowledge available to the public.

The narratives we tell about Greek America have been proliferating. New documentaries, novels, and films are produced, both in the United States and Greek, sometimes earning prestigious international awards. The novel Dendrites (2015), for instance, a story written in Greek about two generations of a Greek American family in Camden, NJ, received the 2017 European Union Prize of Literature. The film Brides (2004), a compelling visual narration of the phenomenon of early twentieth century arranged marriages between Greece and the United States, won the first prize in the Greek State Film Awards. Ergon informs the public about the availability of these narratives and offers perspectives for understanding their significance.

Ergon is a labor of love. It has received grants by OSU’s Humanities and the Arts Discovery Theme, and the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA). Several individual donors have also contributed financially. These valuable gifts cover the cost associated with editing, copy editing, and website maintenance, making the operation of the journal possible. For this I am grateful.

Please visit us at http://ergon.scienzine.com/.

Yiorgos Anagnostou 

Reprinted from the Modern Greek Program Newsletter, Spring 2009. p. 6.

What Makes a U.S. Greek Orthodox Community?

What makes a community? What are the informal practices, building of institutions, rituals, history, memories, commemorations, words, gatherings, gestures that bring about the sense of sharing and belonging that the notion of community entails?

In this writing I reflect on the idea and a reality of the U.S. Greek Orthodox community. What makes a Greek Orthodox community beyond the obvious connecting thread of faith?  My point of departure is the following tribute to a person recently lost to a local parish in Columbus, Ohio:

“Mike moved his family to Columbus from Youngstown (Campbell) ... . He had a prolific career and was well respected by his peers. And for me, Mike embodied the Youngstown mentality I have known my entire life of a strong work ethic, always giving back to our local community and our church, a passion for maintaining a strong Greek culture, and most importantly the love of family and so many friends.

But it is his work with the Columbus Greek Orthodox church and Greek Olympic Society, where we learned how passionate he was about sustaining a Hellenic community in central Ohio.

Mike truly provided powerful leadership in shaping the direction of our small Greek community from the 1980’s to become the largest church community in our diocese. He spent countless hours with me and our Greek Olympic board members guiding us to choose wisely with our donations for causes locally and internationally and even donating to individuals in an effort to make a difference in their lives.

Mike’s honesty, integrity, humor, witty comebacks, laughter, kindness, compassion for others, work ethic and his drive to do the ‘right thing’ even in times of adversity will forever remain in my heart.” (from the Greek Olympic Society Facebook site) 

These words of praise speak to a particular Greek American ethos: the propensity to work tirelessly for building a community and advancing its interests. The venue of commitment to the community in an educational and cultural organization, namely The Greek Olympic Society, which is attached to the parish and its organizational structure (http://www.greekolympicsociety.org/). The aforementioned ethos is recognized as pervasive feature and fixture to a particular locality. But it extends its operation elsewhere, the midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, pointing to a wider regional resonance. 

In the Midwest where I live I have been witnessing for many years the many practices that materialize this Greek American world: the volunteering of professional work (architecture, art, cooking expertise) among parishioners toward building–literally and metaphorically–community life; writing for the community's magazine and funding its publication (see, https://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2016/02/writing-about-community-publication.html); grass-roots volunteering in festivals, language schools, religious and heritage organizations; acts of charity and cultural philanthropy such as supporting University Modern Greek Studies Programs. 

Notably, this is work regularly performed as a labor of love, mostly undertaken without fanfare, with no expectation of formal recognition. It speaks to a wider historical trajectory: the commitment to an institution, the parish, that historically has functioned not merely as a place of worship, but as a place enabling all sorts of social relations, including, significantly, that of mutual support. It speaks to a deep consciousness that this community matters, a consciousness translated into real involvement.

The power of this ethos is that it is enacted concretely and materially, in countless everyday micro-practices, which also include professional and social support to young people. It is through these social practices that many parishioners and their children experience ethnicity in the United States, in all its cultural expressivity (food, dance, social intimacy) as well as social and economic benefits. Beyond its obvious religious implications, the meaning of being Greek Orthodox in Greek America is shaped through participation in numerous family, social, and professional networks, which often overlap and reinforce each other. 

I am not idealizing community here. Authors and scholars have documented the community’s fault lines, points of rupture, disagreement, exclusion, even outright conflict and fragmentation. 

But I feel it is necessary to point out the operation of an ethos that we cannot afford to ignore if we wish to understand “community” making, and ethnoreligious reproduction in Greek America. 

The commemorative tribute above contributes an answer toward a broader question. How is community produced? And what kind of community is constructed and lived? 

Community in this sense entails the collective recognition of a person’s habitual commitment to an array of virtues–hard work, “giving back” to the community, heritage preservation, faith, family and enduring friendships. These are the normative values offered as a template to be emulated. They are the symbolic boundaries around which the parish constructs itself. 

Offering a definitive answer to the question of community, the tribute raises several others. What is the “right thing” to do as a Greek Orthodox?  How is this negotiated and decided within community politics? How is it practiced?
(see, https://ergon.scienzine.com/article/articles/do-the-right-thing) 

Ethnographers and sociologists are best positioned to explore this terrain. But authors and filmmakers also engage with these questions. I will pursue this subject in future postings, discussing the insights they offer and the vision of a community that they project.    

Yiorgos Anagnostou
June 2–15, 2019

Related publications:
https://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/2016/12/narrating-community-history.html

Making the Archive, Animating It

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This summer I decided to devote time into putting some order to the pool of Greek American articles, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, posters, postcards, photographs, brochures, newspapers, community publications, catalogues, LPs, CDs, letters, announcements, and notes I have been accumulating through decades of research. This personal archive of largely public documents covers the recent past between the early 1990s, when I started graduate work, up to 2010 or so, when I started e-filing most of the relevant resources.

The sheer immensity of sorting through pile after pile of paper dwarfs me. Even this relatively small-scale archive looms as an overwhelming task. It does not help that I have no training as an archivist. I cannot devote myself full-time to this ordering either, as summertime is the time of the year calling for reading and writing.

But I persist toiling through amateurish methods. To add a layer of ordering I have even created the website Archiving Greek America featuring selective documents (https://wordpress.com/stats/day/archivinggreekamerica.home.blog).

The site provides motivation and meaning in turning a journey of private collecting into an act of public sharing. It is fulfilling to know that I contribute, albeit in a tiny way, to a larger archival project gaining momentum in Greek America.

Numerous archival initiatives, some funded by international foundations, others by prestigious national organizations, and some by local communities, are in full swing in Greek America. This institutional recognition of the value of the archive and the willingness to invest resources for digitizing it is gaining momentum, expanding and enhancing its public visibility. It preciously adds to the vast–and largely underresearched–available archive (www.mgsa.org/Resources/gkam.html).

***

Sorting through my documents has been far from a mechanical enterprise of neat arrangements. Like any archaeological excavation my delving into the disorganized, I admit, microcosm of paper chaos, holds the prospect of exhilarating findings. The randomness in the order in which some documents appear next to each other produce all sorts of delights (but also frustrating realizations). An editorial declaring pride in ethnic success next to an issue of a valuable magazine now defunct, unable to sustain itself. A document whose existence I had forgotten and so relevant to my current writings. Contradictions abound. Serendipity stretches itself in triumph. Unexpected connections call attention out of random juxtapositions.

The excavation of this material proves productive for bringing into fuller view several contours of Greek America, for making discernible some uncommon linkages.

I trace one contour along the lines of several magazines that left a considerable public imprint before receding from public view, morphing into something else, or ceasing to exist.

Another contour is barely perceptible, dotted by fragmented traces of conversations framed by volumes of silence. We know little if anything at all about the reasons why a cultural initiative which incited interest among some failed to animate interest among others, eventually fading away from contemporary concerns.

Yet another contour points to a well-marked line of interests that continues to make headlines in the popular media.

Through the practice of archiving, a seemingly amorphous terrain starts taking shape into a cultural space crisscrossed by identifiable continuities, recognizable shifts, or perceptible ruptures. And still, it feeds the imagination with a multitude of unknown recesses, unexplored areas, unrecognized resonances. Also, other angles and terrains that escape me.

My archive asserts a presence while making visible, alarmingly so, a gaping absence. I am overwhelmed by the realization, once again, that these documents (scattered but available in the public record) remain largely unexamined. For a substantial volume, if not for all, of this cultural network, there is absolutely no analysis; no scholarship; no public discussion. Consequently, there is no understanding of the processes through which certain projects gained prominence while others faded away. 

***

I return home from the office late at night, blanketed with a sense of dejection. Inevitably, or so it seems. Once again, the urgency to animate the archive presses itself.

To animate an archive, like any past, is to infuse it with another life: study it, circulate the findings, identify its contemporary significance, challenge and inspire researchers, contribute to cultural understanding. It is about linking the archive with the making of books, dissertations, articles, essays, reviews, blogs, commentaries, and documentaries that frame and reframe its significance.

Several dedicated archival activists, academics, researchers, and public intellectuals work intensely and intensively as we speak to materialize these linkages.

But it is not a secret, we all in the field of Greek American studies know what is missing. The critical mass of human resources necessary to fill the multiple gaps, to chart the multiplicity of connections in the record is not (yet?) available.

Perhaps this is what defines the experience of doing Greek American studies, a field that finds itself in lack of cultural and material capital. (Relative lack in some quarters, dire lack in others.) Practicing this field cultivates a heightened consciousness of incompleteness, a partiality in tension. On the one hand, the condition of an underresearched archive feeds the feeling of expansive prospects. On the other hand, the reality of resource scarcity, both material and human is limiting. In turn, it drives the urgent obligation to keep cultivating the archive for greater relevance, for the sheer determination not to allow it to wither; not to allow the displacement or silencing of certain histories and knowledges.

And hence the productive tension residing in the  coexistence between opening prospects and limiting aspects, offering, for me, an ethical and political purpose that makes the dust of the archive and the thrust of achieving its animation a well worthwhile project.

Yiorgos Anagnostou

June 6-8, 2019

Archive Building, Museum Making

A pioneer in archive building and museum making, Helen Zeese Papanikolas (1917–2004) never tired of encouraging Greek America to build its archives and make its museums. Late in her life, in fact three years before her passing, she took the opportunity of a talk sponsored by NYC's Greek-American Women's Network to urge Greek New Yorkers to create a museum in the city. The urgent call was made. The response, fifteen years later, still to come...

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/archivinggreekamerica.home.blog/158

Building a Greek/American Archive

For researchers working on Greek American history and culture 

a new site contributes toward this archive

https://archivinggreekamerica.home.blog