Teaching Resource _ Testimonies of the Second Generation (translated into English)

First interviewee: The very first question employers ask me has to do with my papers, whether I have Greek nationality or immigrant status. This hurts me because it is as if they are saying that the Greeks are favored. I grew up in this country, I attended school here, I do not know more than the Greeks, but I know kind of as much as any Greek I interact with. When I am with Greeks I do not feel different at all. When we go for coffee for example with my friends I do not feel I am from somewhere else [different country], unless one puts a mirror on my face, and then the difference in the appearance is obvious. Even my personality [identity] is Greek, I have embraced the Greek way of life, going out for coffee, going to the movies, things like this. They do not say it on my face but when I am on a bus, and I am the only “foreigner,” an elderly woman would start saying that it is the foreigners who stole the money, then I know that it is directing her comments to me and this bothers me somewhat. But I do not want to leave Greece. People tell me I should leave given all my qualifications and my diploma, but I cannot see myself leaving. I have a positive outlook about this, I see myself staying, I see my future in this country. I will leave only if there is a very important reason. 

Third interviewee (2:58’): The issue of nationality of course concerns me directly because I do not have ties with Africa, which I could develop later in life, but first comes the search for my own roots, to discover where I truly belong; though I feel Greek, this is the only place I have gotten to know. For me Greece is the light, it is everything. The moment I started understanding the Greek language, I started readily developing many facets of my identity [as Greek]. Because I have been attacked, of course I remain on the guard when in public, but I am not changing my everyday habits either. I do not allow this to change me. You see, in 2004 when I was out celebrating with my friends the Greek soccer team winning the European championship waving a Greek flag and showing off the team’s scarf, without my noticing several Golden Dawn members (neo-nazi racists) approached me and they tried to grab from me the flag and the scarf, and there was a brawl, and then I left, what else could I do? I am trapped here. That’s the burning issue. Born here and trapped here.

Translation: Yiorgos Anagnostou

April 2015

Affirmative action for immigrant whites _ By Thomas A. Guglielmo

An incisive critical review of the documentary The Italian Americans; debunking the myth of European American bootstrap mobility; a myth still entrenched in the popular imagination:

"And yet, despite the work of numerous scholars, too few people seem to know anything about them. For the last twenty years, one national poll has found that an overwhelming majority of American residents agree with the following statement: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.”

...

"But this rise [Italian American success] had another, critical source that is too often missing from popular memory about Italian and other European immigrants’ success in America: white privilege. The truth is that these immigrants entered a country with a long, bloody history of drawing deep and distinct color lines — chasms, really — between people socially-defined as white and everyone else, and then assigning rights and resources, power and privilege, accordingly. True, some Americans debated for a time where exactly to place Italians and other Europeans in relation to these lines. At a hearing for the House Committee on Immigration, in 1912, a Pennsylvania congressman wondered whether the “south Italian” constituted a “full-blooded Caucasian.” But, with very few exceptions, European immigrants, Italians included, lived and built their lives on the white side of these color lines. It made all the difference in the world.

It allowed them, first, to become US citizens. During the period of mass European immigration, the right to naturalize was reserved solely for “free white persons” and, after the Civil War, for people of African nativity and descent. And while US courts and government officials in this period routinely blocked Asian immigrants’ efforts to become citizens, they never did so for European newcomers. As a result, migrants from places like Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia always had relatively easy access to citizenship and, eventually, to its broad range of concrete benefits — voting power, government jobs, and, depending on state law, the ability to own land or to work in certain occupations or to serve in public office.

As Italian and other European immigrants settled throughout the United States, their white racial status came to matter monumentally in other ways as well. Today, it is too often forgotten that the urban North of the interwar years, where most Italian and other European immigrants lived, had its own extensive Jim Crow system of sorts. In Chicago, for example, a black-white (and sometimes white-nonwhite) color line wended its way through nearly every imaginable aspect of city life — hospitals and day care centers, camps and schools, nursing homes and YMCAs, workplaces and unions, churches and settlement houses, bars and cafes, roller rinks and billiard halls, swimming pools and beaches, neighborhoods and public housing projects. In concrete terms, this meant that Italians, and everyone on the white side of these lines, enjoyed immense advantages when looking for work, joining a union, buying a home, attending school, receiving medical care, even relaxing on one’s day off — that is, when making the big and small decisions that fashion a life

For the entire essay see, .http://blog.oup.com/2015/03/affirmative-action-immigrant-italian-whites/

My Life in Ruins – A Critical Note

For the last two years I have been working on an analysis of the film My Life in Ruins, now forthcoming in the Fall 2015 issue of the Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies. I was drawn to the film for a variety of reasons. For one, it was of interest to note that this Hollywood film circulates key tenets of Greek nationalism, an observation which makes us reflect on how the enduring power of nationalism “travels” within the global entertainment industry. I also wanted to discuss the film within a transnational framework of analysis. The synergy of Hollywood with the Greek State in the making of the film, the commonalities of the film with the Hollywood genre of "heritage romance," and the issue of Greek American belonging in the U.S. and Greece pointed to the utility of a transnational approach to illuminate the construction of diaspora belonging in the film. The initial draft included a critique of the film, which I removed, however,  for the purpose of coherence in the work. Reading this critique will make fuller sense in the context of my overall argument. But I share this critical note nevertheless in anticipation of the longer piece. 

 

A commercial flop despite high expectations, My Life in Ruins apparently failed to capture the popular imagination. Audience “did not buy into the fantasy, the ideas and images it tried to sell” (1). While the causes of this inadequacy are beyond the scope of this commentary, one can readily recognize how the film leads itself to criticism. Despite the transparency of its weaknesses, I find it necessary to proceed with a brief critique in order to identify the ethical and political implications the film engenders. I do so in order to underscore the idea of belonging as always situated, as a position advancing the interests of certain collectives and undermining those of others (see Yuval-Davis, Kannabiran, Vieten 2006). 

The film’s pampering of the tourist industry and the State, for instance, carries serious implications about those parts of Athens outside tourist itineraries. Furthermore, My Life in Ruins erases the complexity of Greek society and its people. Though it appears to promote women’s interests in the emotional level, it harms them in the professional realm. What is more, It gravely compromises the intellectual and emotional valence of the academy. Its extolling of Greek anti-modernism insults working people who labor harder for less, even before the post-2011 assault of neoliberalism in the country. 

To elaborate, My Life in Ruins once again builds on Greece’s national topoi–ruins of classical sites and landscape–to brand Athens and export a desirable world image in the global competition for tourist and investment dollars. In post-industrial capitalism, cities promote selective aspects of the cityscape to attract visitors through cultural consumption. Because these urban zones are designed for leisure and consumption–a cornucopia of bodies at play and on display–the images hide alternative urban spaces where local and immigrant bodies experience poverty, violence, and surveillance in declining urban environments. “Polished Athens” hides policed Athens and legitimizes unequal spatial development (Karahalios 2011). Selective projection affirms investment in spaces of high consumption and remains indifferent to spaces of urban plight and the working poor elsewhere in the cityscape. Tourism and aesthetic nationalism reinforce each other in hiding the society’s complexity and thus alternative modes of diaspora belonging.

The film’s portrayal of Georgia as one who finds no meaning in the academy displaces alternative belonging. It denies, for instance, the academy as a practice of subjectivity, feeling, and community. What is more, the reduction of the academy as a problematic space intersects with the ideology of belonging via coupling with authentic ethnic maleness and in doing so it advances a problematic position for diaspora women. In exchange for heritage and love, women are instructed to occupy an inferior position in the labor market. They are called to reject the academic profession–an occupation wielding a significant degree of economic and cultural power–for a tourist industry profession caricatured as populist entertainment. Nationalism and tourism converge to narrowly demarcate the range of diaspora women’s professional options.

Note: Comment by the anonymous reviewer for Filmicon.

Works Cited

Karahalios, Harry. “Global Cities, Differential Peripheries: European Cinema and Urban Cities in Transition.” Presentation at the Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium 22, New York, Oct. 13-16, 2011.

Yuval-Davis, N., K. Kannabiran, U. Vieten (2006), ‘Introduction’, in N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, and U. Vieten (eds), The Situated Politics of Belonging, London: Sage Publications, pp. 1-16.

Documentary about Dan Georgakas

http://www.tovima.gr/culture/article/?aid=685179

Orthodoxy and the Civil Rights Movement

https://civilrights.goarch.org/photo-gallery

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. . . .