***
In 2008, around the time I completed my tenure book, I found myself at a crossroads, confronted by the inevitable question regarding the next step. Conventional academic wisdom was directing me toward a second manuscript, a prospect I was indeed contemplating. As a latecomer in the academy––PhD at the age of forty––I was told to carefully weigh on my career options. Yet certain circumstances were pulling me toward alternative paths, emerging mostly due to developments in Greek/American popular culture and issues confronting Greek American studies (GAS), an academic field to which I have devoted my academic life (2000–ongoing).
Several happenings in popular and academic culture were indeed pressing for notice. Hollywood's My Life in Ruins was released in 2009, adding one more item in my list of films I wanted to write about––the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (MBFGW, 2002) already “begging” for GAS attention. I was also experiencing a strong impulse to reflect on the place of diaspora studies in relation to US modern Greek studies (2010). The ways concepts such as “diaspora” were understood by an earlier generation of GAS researchers needed, I felt, addressing too. It was ripe time to critically engage with GAS canonical scholarship and propose a revisionist angle in Greek American historiography––an interest lasting up to this day. What is more, the initial impact of the “Greek economic crisis” on the homeland-diaspora relations was around the corner.
The idea of taking up “small-scale” projects was alluring, particularly given my exhaustion from having just finished a demanding book, a work produced under immense pressure. This mode of writing would offer a momentary respite, I thought, and “buy time” for my new book idea to ripen. But instead, it turned into a purposeful, long term “nomadic” approach to academic and broadly public writing.
Article-writing was given critical purpose via my cultural studies interest in examining cultural texts and practices (film, documentary, literature, ethic parades, autobiography identity narratives, etc.) as components of broader discourses (nationalism, religion, race, diaspora)––this in the context of power relations. I saw publishing in this mode a strategy to place new Greek American texts drawing national attention in connection to relevant academic conversations, positioning in this manner GAS as an active player in the process. Situating MBFGW in connection to white ethnicity (2012), for example, placed my work in a journal exploring US multiculturalism.
When the Greek economic crisis descended upon us, the role of the diaspora, not only as an agent mobilizing in solidarity with Greece, but also as a site of branding global identity, was impossible to ignore (2021, 2022). Of major importance also was the centenary of the Ludlow Massacre (2014) which generated great interest among scholars, journalists and public intellectuals working on the history of the American working class. I published about the (re)making of Cretan/Greek/American labor organizer Louis Tikas in a documentary produced in Greece (2014) as well as his poetic evocation in David Mason’s verse-novel Ludlow (2016).
Additional anniversaries were pressing for GAS critical presence. The bicentenary of the Greek revolution led to an essay reframing US philhellenism (2022) and a book chapter shifting the focus from the nation to diasporic citizenship (2023). A year later, a strong desire to honor the centenary of the Castle Gate Mine Disaster (2024) resulted in two articles and several newspaper articles in the Greek and diaspora media.
Earlier, a host of issues called for academic contributions: the MTV “Growing Up Greek” controversy (2017), for example, and the urgency to think about public humanities as a venue to explore the position of academics in relation to community discourses (2015). Of interest was the spectacularization of ethnicity and its connection with American sports, which called for examining heritage as commodity (2019). There were grass-roots initiatives to foster Greek American–African American solidarities, and then the Black Lives Matter movement and its implications for Greek America, which called for involvement (2020). Book reviews needed to be written, Helladic representations of the diaspora interrogated, popular representations of Greek American identity discussed, the post-mortem publications of deceased colleagues acknowledged (2015, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024). Personal motivation directed my experimentation with diaspora poetics in a hybrid form (2021).
Then, emerging conversations about neglected topics such as gender and sexuality (2021) pulled me to their orbit. I connected my writing about the intersection of gender, sexuality and food in the diaspora, the latter yet another gravely under-researched topic (2023). The initiative to place GAS in conversation with other diasporic studies––Italian American for instance––led to a collaboration and a co-edited volume (2022). A memorable experience in Australia resulted in writings about Greek American arts and US multiculturalism (forthcoming) and reflection on Greek Australia (2024). Greece’s strategic plan for the diaspora called for a position paper (2024), and the increasing interest in global Hellenism has generated a project in progress.
As the saying goes, one thing led to another… cascading to a frenetic academic courtship. The ebbs and flows of this route required the navigation of a terrain mostly uncharted for me. One, as you would expect, was writing about emerging and unfolding phenomena in the here and now not in a journalistic but scholarly fashion, a demanding––we all know––practice. Another was negotiating new disciplinary terrains outside “my expertise”––if I ever had any––public humanities, public diplomacy, sociology, life history, film and documentary studies; sexuality and foodways; Italian American studies.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries requires fluid versatility which is not only intellectual demanding––to the point of exhaustion––but also a venue exposing a scholar to vulnerability. The articles were written as interventions but sacrificed the depth that only the manuscript mode can dig. I was fortunate that the writing of the Contours of White Ethnicity had somewhat prepared me for this kind of “nomadic” scholarship. (Out of necessity, often, given the scarcity of research on a wide range of topic I needed to address in order to advance my work.)
The project of multicentered, border-crossing scholarship required an austere regime of reading and writing as well as tons of patience (and pleasures). The embodied memory still dripping from all this experience is the sense of being intellectually dwarfed anytime I entered a new terrain of inquiry and the scholarship animating it. There is also the fact that one does not get a ton of academic fellowships––and the privilege of spacious time for writing that comes with the package––on the virtue of articles alone. I was fortunate to enjoy research leaves granted by my public institution and two precious external Fellowships. Summers offered oases for sustained writing thousands of miles away from the (now demythologized) Ελληνικό καλοκαίρι.
It was nomadic but not directionless, random work. The overall strategy was a series of tactical critical engagements with newly circulated Greek American texts and practices and their placing in relation to broader questions about governmentality, nation-centric appropriations of the diaspora, nationalism from afar, revisionist historiography, public intellectuals, immigrant poetics, cultural hegemony and critique, identity branding, pedagogies of heritage transmission, intersections of GAS with Italian American studies.
The aim was to interrogate essentialized renderings of diaspora identity and explain the harmful political implications of these reductions. Also, to place GAS, demonstrating its value, into broader fields such as US “Mediterranean studies” or the discourse of “white ethnicity.” All along I was operating under the premise that this approach empowers the relevance of GAS in the US academy, a vital value for the institutional future of the field.
These were the potential gains motivating my work though I was well-aware that the absence of a critical mass of cultural-studies scholars in GAS risked the marginalization of this corpus (both in the US and Greece). In bleak moments I sought solace to the idea that I was at least creating a scholarly archive of a historical period––that of diasporized multiculturalism, the increasing authority of grassroots identity narratives, and an ideological investment in undermining their dominance.
This is the critical mode then that turned article-writing into my academic modus operandi. It was a practice performed in parallel with writing blogs and essays for the diaspora and Greek media (The National Herald, Neos Kosmos, TOBHMA, TA NEA, The Books’ Journal, as well as essays and editorials, both in Greek and English, in Ergon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters, a labor of love). At the same time, I felt throughout the pull of a “diasporic drive,” to write for Greek audiences (Ο Πολίτης, Marginalia, Σύγχρονα Θέματα, chapters in edited volumes, essays in non-academic journals). [Perhaps it is time for scholars to ask academic credit for multilingual publishing––yet another laborious activity.]
In retrospect, I can now place––with relative certainty––this trajectory of nomadic scholarship in connection to the conditions defining GAS, then and now. Had the field enjoyed a critical mass of practitioners in diverse disciplines, I would have not felt the urgency for this tactical academic nomadism. Far from being a personal whim then, my academic route was a product of specific contingencies in a particular historical moment. [which explain my ongoing preoccupation with the advancement of Greek diaspora studies.]
Was all this worthwhile? There is no single answer to this question. Books, of course, bring more visibility and accolades, more invitations for talks and keynotes, more prospects for prestigious research leaves. Being at the core of the academy’s cultural capital are not disconnected from material gains. Most importantly, for me, they open opportunities for Fellowships granting invaluable time for uninterrupted writing.
Throughout all this I was conscious of the potential gains motivating my work, though I was well-aware that the absence of a critical mass of cultural studies scholars in GAS risks the marginalization of this corpus. Work is being done to expand the intellectual network fostering critical exchange among practitioners in the field.
But in the context of my own commitments and politics, the making of a corpus of writing that spoke to contemporary and emerging phenomena has been a profoundly meaningful experience. It represents the imprinting of systematic interventionist scholarship, a meaningful trade off overall for what was lost and compromised––I try to convince myself as I grapple with what should come next in the shrinking available time in the horizon …
Yiorgos Anagnostou
Acknowledgment: Dedicated with profound appreciation to all the colleagues, civic friends, and beloved friends who sustained me in the carving of my trajectory.
You are far too modest about the seminal contribution that Ergon has made, and your pivotal role in founding and sustaining this jewel!
ReplyDeleteAlas I should have pursued a PhD in GAS. But it is hard to bring weight to a minority of a minority. Where pray can I send a book of essays about the GA experience through a female perspective? Would anyone even care?
ReplyDelete