Contours of White Ethnicity — 2009 ·

Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America

“This is a book of great importance. Contours of White Ethnicity demonstrates a patient and very deep reflection on the past, present, and future of ethnicity in America. Its immediate subject—popular ethnography’s treatment of the Greek immigrant past in America—is quite precise, but its scope is wide.”

Artemis Leontis — Department of Modern Greek, University of Michigan

“Contours of White Ethnicity charts new directions for the study of white ethnicities in the United States. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, the study exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.”

SirReadalot.org

“Yiorgos Anagnostou. . . demonstrates that there are many ways of being Greek American in his very new book, Contours of White Ethnicity.

Greek News

In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences.

Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts.

Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.

Yiorgos Anagnostou is an associate professor of modern Greek and American ethnic studies at the Ohio State University. He has published widely on ethnicity and immigration in various scholarly disciplines, including ethnography, folklore, sociology, and diaspora and cultural studies.