"Is is possible that what the public sees as an impending cultural extinction is in fact Greek America’s profound remaking? This transformation is emergent and therefore difficult to grasp, as our available categories—such as ethnic community or ethnic culture—are inadequate to capture the unfolding phenomena. In the absence of a language to help us name, discern, and comprehend these transformations, many resort to the vocabulary of extinction. The old is undergoing a substantial rearrangement of its elements; aspects of it are even disappearing. The new has not yet taken a discernible form. The challenge is for us to understand these multifaceted developments. Who says that practicing Greek American studies lacks excitement?"
My aim was to orient the imagining of Greek America beyond its conventional tropes––which in retrospect they persist and now even enjoy a sort of revitalization. My scope was beyond charting the “changing same,” the ways cultural practices and organizations (say folk dancing, regional societies) reconfigure or recontextualize their identitarian preservationist projects. There is great merit of course to study these relatively visible phenomena.
My interest was in invisible and emergent developments in Greek America––a great challenge to identify given the tiny number of ethnographers working in the field (and who produce excellent work).
The recent, ongoing initiative “Voices of the Other Greek America” probed me to revisit this interest as it has been sketching several spaces in the mapping I was imagining. It involves a variety of community modalities with porous borders, often extending one into another.
First is the articulation of what I call “practices of care,” structures of feeling expressed as affective support and solidarity with those who participate in the social life of the community but relegated as lesser, non-authentic, “not-Greek” enough; or those who rebel against the community’s norms and subjected to ostracism.
Practices of care are expressed in words and extended in social interaction. In everyday life they involve people from all walks of life, though usually find public expression in the voices of academics and artists who make a point to incorporate the voices of those negatively affected by hierarchies and exclusions. A genealogy of this structure of feeling will include Greek/American calls in the 1970s and 1980s for solidarity with socially vulnerable non-Greek demographics as well as scholarship and the arts in the 1990s and beyond critiquing exclusionary narratives of identity homogenizing and idealizing the group.
Individuals caring to enhance the visibility and empower this space could utilize a variety of genres––essay, short story, poetry, letter to editors, newspaper editorial, plays, song––and disseminate it far and wide.
Second is proposing spaces of transcultural mixing (music, the arts, performances) as inclusive venues enabling coexistence for all sorts of multicultural subjectivities. Moving away from “ethnicity as authenticity,” these "third spaces" cultivate post-ethnic communities of belonging where multiplicity (bicultural, ethnic, and non-ethnic identities) is the mode of belonging.
Recognized by modern Greek studies scholars (certainly vocally at my own institution as syncretic Hellenism when I was a graduate student in the 1990s) as an inherent dimension of diasporic identities, mixing was sidelined by nationalist renderings of the “diaspora”––though it continued operating in popular culture (in music, Dr. Bouzouki’s rendering of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” in Greek for example) and the arts, including poetry.
Now rendered legitimate by dominant institutions (see Orthodox Observer), mixing moves Greek America to zones of cross-cultural exchanges and cosmopolitan terrains beyond insular ethnicity and nationalist appropriations of the diaspora.
Third is rendering visible small scale, local, decentralized, loosely connected social circles gathering to exchange ideas, knowledge, experiences; to comment and reflect on things Greek. Cultivating informal sociability, these gathering enrich the participants who may find inspiration and motivation to incorporate the learning they privately accrue to their public endeavors, an invisible transmission unless an ethnographer attends to these circulations.
Fourth is the recognition of what I called the Greek/American inheritance, the work produced in the past by scholars, researchers, artists who resisted monophonic narratives of identity and ahistorical heritage to contribute to rich imaginings of Greek America. Attending to the contributions of each one of those cultural workers is one way to foreground their legacy.
But there is yet another route that we could cultivate this legacy, one which would orient us and hopefully intersect us with the communities I outlined above:
Orienting our writings toward contributing to the empowerment of practices of care, making visible syncretic expressions of Hellenism (and their significance), disseminating our work in ways that could reach all sorts of communities of learning.
This matters. There is an audience in these spaces, I believe, with which we could interface as we continue the project of probing other emergent or invisible Greek Americas in the terrain...
Yiorgos Anagnostou
02/07/2026
02/07/2026
