Redirecting Ethnic Singularity

Abstract

This project builds on transcultural and comparative analysis to yield new insights in the conversation about European Americans. The focus of this volume is Italian Americans and Greek Americans, two ethnic groups that historically have been classified in relatively similar situated ethnoracial otherness: they were placed outside “whiteness” early in the twentieth century, labeled “white ethnics” in the 1970s ethnic revival, and rendered symbolic ethnics in the academy in the 1980s and beyond. How did each group negotiate this constitutive historical experience? What cultural resources did it mobilize and for what purpose? How did the strategies of each group converge or diverge? How do the practices of one ethnic group comparatively illuminate the practices of the other? The contributors to this book explore these questions via the careful contextualization of a multitude of cultural expressions and institutional formations. This multidisciplinary volume contributes to contemporary conversations about immigrant integration, transatlantic circulations of culture, the public display and politics of identity, the making of and resistance to whiteness, representations of ethnicity in U.S. popular culture, tactical interethnic solidarities, the ethnic revival, and the forging of intercultural bonds. It utilizes comparative and transcultural analysis to not only illuminate anew the histories and cultures of Italian and Greek Americans, but also to start opening new analytical routes toward the understanding of Southeastern European Americans in their ever-shifting cultural landscapes.