Reflections on a Greek American Bibliography

I recently read with interest the entries under the section “The Greek Diaspora and Greek Emigration: Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek History. It was good to see the topic of migration and diaspora included in this volume and prestigious venue, even in a separate unit and this comparative modality.

Crafting an entry in the genre of handbooks is no small task. Authors are called to meander through a longue durée of time and somehow manage to do justice to multifaced historical trajectories. A century and more of history in some of our cases in less than 2,000 words. Achieving this representation requires a bird’s eye view of history, the power relations traversing through it, and intimate knowledge of its specifics to draw a meaningful survey bringing in conversation the general and the particular, the canonical and the unorthodox, the conventional and the innovative.

 
While reading “The Greek Diaspora and Greek Emigration” there were moments when I marveled at the authors’ dexterity to negotiate the challenges of the genre.

I was surprised though by the range of the bibliography and the scope of the recommended “further readings” of the Greek American entry. It cites several standard resources from conventional Greek American historiography (Theodore Saloutos, Charles Moskos,) but leaves out a host of publications which have been advancing the field since the 1990s toward previously uncharted research domains.

Going over the list, several missing scholarly contributions cascaded through my mind. They are books which

(a) were published by prestigious US University Presses

(b) opened new conceptual spaces, advancing the field in conversation with theories of diaspora, migration, subjectivity

(c) have been widely discussed by US diaspora and migration scholars

(d) have been extensively cited by prominent scholars and the next generation of researchers

(e) offer examples of powerfully written, sophisticated and innovative analyses of new research domains

There is also major articles or book chapters carving new directions for the field.

Those of us who know the field we automatically recognize these omissions. It is puzzling. But one of the major sources of power associated with this genre is to orient contemporary (and future) readers who are not familiar with the histories, debates, contributions of this field. It involves a gesture of power toward the making of a canon.

A comprehensive bibliography is of course not possible in this case due to the limitations of the genre. But the task (in fact the responsibility) is to come up with a more expansive pool of resources than the one offered here. To foreground the polyvocality of the field and its multifaceted directions.

I see that the volume is in Progress. I hope that the editors will take the step to rectify this one problematic aspect of the contribution.

 
https://academic.oup.com/.../chapter-abstract/523978577...

Yiorgos Anagnostou

July 11