Visual Teaching Resource _ The Greek Crisis (New Documentary)

Out Here: A documentary about the Initiative Against the Greek Crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZkBlaCaEbM#t=2910

Reviewing The Italian Americans

With frigid temperatures blanketing Columbus I spent the long weekend drafting my review of the new documentary The Italian Americans. Broadcast this month on PBS, this is a four hour documentary chronicling Italian American transformations.

I felt a sense of heightened awareness while writing about a piece of popular culture at the same time when the nation was watching. A sense of temporal alignment between the act of writing and the imaginary audience. Book or film reviews are an undervalued academic genre. From my part, I cannot stress enough their importance as a forum for critical reflection and in this manner a venue to advance reflective new scholarship and cultural production.

http://www.pbs.org/the-italian-americans/home/

I am sharing below the opening paragraph (a draft); this will be the only sample of writing I will be sharing before the review's publication:

"How does one get to know Italian Americans? Piercing at the heart of the documentary, the question is brought into focus in the opening scenes, in the contrast between cinematic representations and personal accounts of Italian ethnicity. Film and self-narration produce two ways of knowing, dramatically at odds with each other. On the one hand, cinematic images – most notably Mafia-related – entrench this ethnicity as a pernicious stereotype in the national imagination. Popular fictions are consumed as ethnic facts. Ethnicity refers to a singular truth. On the other hand, first-person narratives question the stereotype head on. Films create a reality for ethnicity that real Italian Americans do not recognize as their own. Thus self-representation corrects public misrecognition. Ethnographic testimonies contest the poisonous myth of Italian American association with criminality. Taken together, they establish Italian America as a diverse social field, projecting ethnicity as plurality of truths. If the underworld is not alien to Italian Americans, to cite a pertinent example, it is certainly alien to a great many in the collective."

Greek Americana: U.S. License Plates in Transliterated Greek and not only...

A multi-semantic geography of the personal, the national, the regional, the everyday, the folk, the popular, the secular and the religious marking Greek difference in U.S. traffic.

Signs of national and regional identity, the double meaning of rural images (moulari), insults, also hurled at bad drivers (ftou sou), the play of secular and religious (Hristo), the marking of personal status or state of things (ftoxia), everyday sayings that could also serve as popular song refrains (xehase to). 

Άστα φίλε μου... :

http://www.gazzetta.gr/plus/article/706005/pinakides-made-greece-pics

Many thanks to EB for bringing this to my attention

Teaching Athens _ Visual Resources

There is the experience of some precious moments when the vast, amorphous energy a teacher invests in the classroom crystallizes into a tangible moment of gratification.

I do not necessarily refer to the moment of a positive student evaluation, we all know this territory is nebulous.

I refer to the moment when a former student writes to share material about a course's subject matter.

In the middle of a distressful Saturday I received the following note which recalibrated the day:

"I would like to share a nice collection of Athenian Photographs that could be added to the archives of your Athens class documenting both the Old and Modern City":

http://www.athenswalk.net/_/sitemap.html

A biography of a course 

animates beyond campus 

Unexpected fragments

return traces 

of an unknown trajectory
Spill memories
of an early chapter,

ah! 

Many thanks GP! I reciprocate:

http://athensinapoem.com

(and do not forget to turn in Thursday's assignment...)

Public Scholarship and Greek America: Personal Reflections, Intellectual Vocations

Journal of Modern Greek Studies (forthcoming, Spring 2015)

If public scholarship brings together one’s subjectivity, academic work, and participation in overall intellectual life, I see no other route to enter this conversation than through the perspective of my intellectual biography. I find it necessary, in other words, to link aspects of my life, research, and involvement in the world of ideas beyond the college campus. To introduce my position succinctly: I owe a turning point in my biography to Modern Greek Studies in the U.S., the institution that has enabled my work. My entry into this institution and its professional life signals my transformation from a working class immigrant with a degree in civil engineering to a humanities and social sciences academic. It represents my reinvention. In retrospect, as a scholar who also writes about American ethnicities, I am inclined to frame this transition as a quintessentially Greek/American moment: a place of Greek learning in the United States—supported in some cases by Greek American monies, let me add—puts in motion the foundational narrative of America as a place of new beginnings. If an educational rebirth redirects one’s life project, it is safe to say that my connection with Modern Greek Studies is experienced viscerally. And as an intellectual, affective, but also material affiliation that crystallizes into an organic relationship, my professional being renders the separation of scholarship, personal conviction, and public engagement alien to me. . . . 

Modern Greek Studies and Public Scholarship: Intersections and Prospects

Journal of Modern Greek Studies (forthcoming, Spring 2015) 

Public involvement in U.S. Modern Greek Studies represents both a visible and an invisible practice. Although an obvious presence among non-academic publics, it is largely absent as an object of critical reflection. The ethos of civic responsibility—of giving back to the community—has defined Modern Greek, being also consistent with the founding principle of American higher education, namely to “serve the interests of the larger community” (Boyer 1990, 21-22). But this public participation rarely merits analytical attention. It is as though a wall obscures the connection between academic work and its scholarly rendering for various non-academic publics both within and beyond university campuses. Activities that are fundamentally interconnected are artificially severed. If scholars of Modern Greek have honed the skills necessary for sophisticated analyses of various boundaries, this particular boundary still awaits serious consideration. . . . 

Re/collecting Greek America: Reflections on Ethnic Struggle, Success, and Survival

Journal of Modern Hellenism, Vol. 31 (Forthcoming, Winter 2015)

Two interrelated ideas guide this essay: the notion of history as re/collection, and history as cultural practice. A concept with a twofold meaning, re/collection captures both remembering and revisiting an archive to remember anew. Re/collection animates rediscovery and recovery. It brings into focus what earlier collecting has intentionally or unintentionally overlooked or marginalized. In this dual capacity, re/collection forestalls forgetting and expands the range and scope of remembering. It enables knowing differently.

Historical re/collection illuminates history as cultural practice. Historians recognize that the making of history is not a disinterested enterprise divorced from cultural assumptions and ideas. This is the reason why at any one time, society may privilege the telling of some pasts and the sidelining of others. Because certain voices are excluded, remembering is punctuated by absences. Thus critical historiography asks, who produces history? How and for what purpose? What pasts does a society remember and why? This approach explains the silences in the historical record, and reflects on the consequences of forgetting. In turn, reflexivity probes re/collection to produce new pasts. Re/collection is an integral component of history as cultural practice.1

To bring the idea of history as cultural practice to bear in relation to ethnic historiography: The American/immigrant narrative of success defines achievement in terms of money, status, career, entrepreneurship, and assimilation; not in terms of an immigrant’s worth as a person, ability to build intercultural bridges, creative negotiations with bicultural belonging, or selective ethnic reproduction. In the case of Greek America, for instance, history notes the divergent cultural positioning of male and female immigrants to point out that success as socioeconomic achievement refers to men, and success as civic and cultural achievement refers to women.2 In response, one could raise two questions: why does this narrative privilege socioeconomic status? And why does it present it as ethnic when the narrative essentially speaks to a gender-specific (male) experience? Critical scholarship endeavors to examine, as I pointed out, the implications of this social construction. Immigrant success as socioeconomic status legitimizes the American Dream. The mobility of newcomers asserts the inclusiveness of the nation. Demonstrating the gender inflection in this story of success would identify this story’s displacements. The framing of male history as ethnic renders invisible women’s alternative struggles and successes, and thus masks different visions of becoming an American ethnic. The practice of reflexivity in history illuminates presences and absences in a collection of evidence, and helps us think about their respective ramifications. 

...

George Pelecanos in conversation (Athens, Greece)

http://www.sgt.gr/players/lns/20141204/en/

Solidarity with African Americans Now _ A Must Read about Race in the U.S.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27773-revelations-of-postracial-ferguson

"The one encouraging outcome as a result of these turns, likewise revealed by events in and around Ferguson, is that youthful counter-activists are beginning to realize something novel is afoot. They are beginning as a result to respond by shifting tactics, too. They are increasingly engaging in a mix of now-you-see-me-now-you-don't performance interventions and potentially viral social media campaigns alongside the more traditional large-scale street protests. They are thus calling attention to and into question these conditions of sustained injustice at key sites of their sustenance: at elite cultural events such as the St. Louis Symphony, local city hall and state capitol. They are engaging in "die-ins" at popular, large local malls frequented more by whites than people of color (there are pretty much no malls remaining in Ferguson itself). And they are pushing out on social media the "Black Lives Matter" campaign."

Greek Americans embrace Yanni Antetokounmpo as their own

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JW4zL19a6A