Greek American Research Articles

Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen

Reviewed by: Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen Jack Neubauer Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? By Gonda Van Steen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xx + 330 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $39.95. Since the conclusion of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Asian children have been adopted by families in the United States and across the Global North. This story is well known. Successive waves of international adoptions from Korea, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere were celebrated in the media and popular culture at the time, and more recently they have been the subject of a growing body of critical scholarship by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Arissa Oh, Leslie Wang, and others. In contrast, the story of the approximately 3,200 Greek children adopted by American families during the Cold War remains largely unknown. As a result, readers of Gonda Van Steen's meticulously researched book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece, may be surprised to learn that during the "early Cold War period" (1948–1962), adoptions of Greek children to the United States far outpaced even those of Korean children on a per capita basis. An accomplished scholar of ancient Greek theater, Van Steen was inspired to research the history of Cold War Greek adoptions when she received an email from a young man named Mike, whose mother and aunt were adopted by a Greek American family after their father, Greek Communist Elias Argyriadis, [End Page 158] was executed by the Greek state in 1952. The intergenerational story of the Argyriadis family provides a narrative anchor for Van Steen's analysis of Greek-to-American adoptions, which she argues were shaped by the interconnected histories of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the global Cold War, and the broader international adoption movement. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes the combustible mixture of "push factors" driving the initial wave of Greek-to-American adoptions in the early 1950s. These include the dire social conditions of post–Civil War Greece (as of 1950, an estimated one in eight Greek children had lost one or both parents), violent persecution of left-wing families, and the Greek state's efforts, led by Queen Frederica, to cultivate American sympathy for "orphan Greece" while alleviating its social welfare burdens. In Part II, Van Steen demonstrates how early efforts to "find families" for Greek orphans transformed into a movement that was driven primarily by "the pull factor of the American demand for available white children" (125). The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), the largest Greek American voluntary association, helped meet this demand for Greek children through "proxy" adoptions in which a third-party agent matched prospective parents and Greek children with little screening or oversight. The result, Van Steen argues, was "a full-blown black market for babies" that enriched greedy Greek and American middlemen, who resorted to bribery and coercion to reclassify the stigmatized children of Greek single mothers as "adoptable orphans" (124). Based on extensive interviews, Part III presents a montage of individual adoption stories that illuminate the diversity of adoptees' attitudes and experiences. First, Van Steen introduces us to Dionysios Dionou, who refers to himself as a "stolen child" and calls his adopters "purchasers" rather than parents (185–87). A few pages later, we meet Dean, whose adoptive family lovingly joke that the $500 in fees they paid to adopt him was "the deal of a lifetime." Dean even framed the check his American parents used to pay for his adoption as symbol of their special family history (189–90). If the many individual stories in this section eventually start to bleed together in the reader's mind, it only underscores Van Steen's argument that they are constitutive of an emerging "collective subjectivity among Greek adoptees" (239). Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece is intended for both academic specialists and Greek adoptees interested in understanding the complex history behind their own personal journeys. For readers interested in the broader histories of childhood and adoption, Van Steen's in-depth analysis of Cold War Greece provides a fascinating case study for...

The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913 by Peter S. Giakoumis

Reviewed by: The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913 by Peter S. Giakoumis Fevronia K. Soumakis (bio) Peter S. Giakoumis, The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913. Rochester, NY: Starry Night Publishing, 2020. Pp. iii + 686. 18 illustrations. Paper $24.00. Peter S. Giakoumis’s The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans andPhilhellenes, 1912–1913 is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of Greek America. Giakoumis sheds light on the little-known contributions of Greek American soldiers who returned to Greece to [End Page 469] fight in the Balkan Wars between 1912 and 1913. At the conclusion of those wars, the Greek kingdom nearly doubled in size and population through the incorporation of Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Epirus, Crete, and the eastern Aegean islands. In his 1964 history The Greeks in the United States, Theodore Saloutos describes the events leading up to the mobilization of approximately 45,000 men who returned to Greece to fight (Saloutos 1964, 96–117). Giakoumis expands upon Saloutos’s work by situating Greek American volunteers and philhellene supporters within the broader political and military context of the Balkan Wars. Giakoumis did not set out to write a monograph. Rather, his purpose was to uncover the voices and experiences of Greek American soldiers during the war. In doing so, he relies on extensive documentation: his book is a compilation of reprinted newspaper articles, photographs, reports, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and quotations from secondary sources. The author brings to life the “forgotten heroes” of Greek immigrant life as well as the unfolding social and political events in Greece and the United States. The history of the soldiers’ involvement in the Balkan Wars is told overwhelmingly through primary source documents and historical timelines. The book is divided into eight chapters with eight appendices that comprise nearly one-quarter of the book. The first chapter presents newspaper excerpts that detail world events leading up to the Balkan Wars. In the second chapter, the author explores Greek communal life in the United States between 1900 and 1913. Spyros Matsoukas, “the inspired apostle and patriotic missionary” figures prominently in the Greek-language newspapers: Matsoukas arrived in the United States from Greece in 1909 and embarked on an ambitious fund-raising tour that raised thousands of dollars toward the “regeneration and rehabilitation” of Greece, including the purchase of a battleship (35). In the same year, the first Greek American military clubs were established in major cities in anticipation of an impending war with Ottoman Turkey. These military units were made up of Greek military veterans as well as those without prior military training. They received ample coverage in the American press, as for instance on 9 October 1910, when the St. Louis Dispatch ran the headline “Greeks Arming and Drilling in St. Louis, Strange New Colony Ready to Attack Turkey—Subscribe for a Battleship—Greeks all over Southwest Co-Operate” (40). In addition to showcasing the activities of military units as reported by Greek-language and other American newspapers, Giakoumis rightly focuses on the important work of the Panhellenic Union in mobilizing Greek American volunteers during the Balkan Wars. The Union was established in New York in 1907 as a mutual benefit society and a centralized vehicle for uniting [End Page 470] and harnessing the financial capacities of Greek immigrants. The remainder of chapter 2 captures Greek immigrant life in many parts of the United States through the lens of the American press, focusing in particular on Greek Americans’ initial settlement, establishment of businesses and churches, and other important activities. Giakoumis asserts that, as war loomed on the horizon, there were three notable components that defined the Greek American response: “1. They raised over $400,000 USD. 2. Greek-American soldiers set out to fight in the war, even though a fair number of them did not have prior military service. 3. Most of them returned to the U.S. after the war” (103). On 17 September 1912 the Greek government issued mobilization instructions ordering Greek veterans, reservists, and men of military age to return to Greece to fight. Many Greeks in the United States...

HUMAN HERPESVIRUS 8 (HHV8)-NEGATIVE MULTICENTRIC CASTLEMAN DISEASE LEADING TO GROUP 1 PULMONARY ARTERY HYPERTENSION AND CLINICALLY SIGNIFICANT RIGHT VENTRICULAR SYSTOLIC DYSFUNCTION

HUMAN HERPESVIRUS 8 (HHV8)-NEGATIVE MULTICENTRIC CASTLEMAN DISEASE LEADING TO GROUP 1 PULMONARY ARTERY HYPERTENSION AND CLINICALLY SIGNIFICANT RIGHT VENTRICULAR SYSTOLIC DYSFUNCTION

Robert A. Georges (1933–2022)

Robert A. Georges (1933–2022)

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

<i>Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century</i>, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

Writing the Greek Revolution: Harry Mark Petrakis’s The Hour of the Bell

Petrakis’s novels about the Greek Revolution are the most significant efforts by an American author, in this case a Greek American author, to place the narrative of the struggle in front of an American public. This paper uses the journal that Petrakis kept while writing The Hour of the Bell to examine his thoughts and motives in the composition of the book, with close attention to Petrakis’s reading of the American philhellene Samuel Gridley Howe’s contemporary history of the war. The ways Petrakis uses Howe, and the ways he does not, offer insight into Petrakis’s own goals and conflicts in writing his version of the Greek Revolution for an American public.

Multilingual Literature of the United States

Like the Russian Federation, the United States is a multilingual, multicultural society. A nation of immigrants and indigenous peoples, it has produced a rich body of literature in dozens of languages in addition to English that scholars have only in recent decades begun to pay attention to. Of particular note are texts in Spanish, Yiddish, Chinese, French, Hebrew, German, Arabic, Norwegian, Welsh, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Vietnamese and numerous American Indian languages. In this paper we observe the most significant texts of multilingual American literature. The corpus of literary works shows us, that despite Americans pervasive and enduring xenolinguaphobia - aversion to other languages - the United States, like other large countries, is a heterogeneous amalgam. Ignoring the variety of works written in languages other than English impoverishes the national culture and handicaps serious readers.

Theodora D. Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature | Michela Baldo, Italian-Canadian Narratives of Return. Analysing Cultural Translation in Diasporic Writing

Theodora D. Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature | Michela Baldo, Italian-Canadian Narratives of Return. Analysing Cultural Translation in Diasporic Writing

Off-White Romantics: Cross-cultural Histories of Immigrant Picture Brides and the Process of US Race Making

Abstract The stories of early twentieth-century Japanese picture brides—women in arranged marriages coming to the United States to meet the immigrant men to whom they were married by “proxy” according to the popular press—are widely known in memory, scholarship, and popular culture. Less is known about their Southern European counterparts—primarily women from Greece, but also Italy and Armenia—coming to the country at the same time, and to much less public outcry and legislative restrictions. Yet as this article demonstrates, the title of “picture bride “ was prominently and popularly applied to Southern European and Japanese women alike as a politically charged racial signifier that provides nuance to the complex yet fluid racial hierarchies of the early twentieth century. This article closely examines popular media depictions of “off-white” picture brides using Greek immigrants as a case study—the predominant European group practicing picture marriage from 1907 to 1924—to demonstrate the quotidian ways that audiences learned the politics of race and immigration through seemingly apolitical messages about family, marriage, and romantic love. This work argues that far from being a mere footnote in Greek American history, picture brides and their popular depictions in national newspapers were critical symbols of Greeks’ transition from “in-between” white others to ethnic white Americans. By contextualizing picture marriage as occurring across a diverse racial hierarchy, this work illumines the ways that white supremacy acts in contradictory, often hypocritical ways, excluding some groups while excusing and including others.

The Vanishing Greek Americans: A Crisis of Identity by Alice Scourby

Reviewed by: The Vanishing Greek Americans: A Crisis of Identity by Alice Scourby Yiorgos Anagnostou (bio) Alice Scourby, The Vanishing Greek Americans: A Crisis of Identity. River Vale, NJ: Cosmos Publishing. 2020. Pp. ix + 139. 7 illustrations, 6 tables, appendix. Paper $19.95. The Vanishing Greek Americans: A Crisis of Identity revisits a sociological question that preoccupied Alice Scourby (1926–2009): the place of ethnic identity in high modernity. If identity in the premodern world was given and relatively stable, contemporary identity is in flux. Individuals may distance themselves from previous self-identifications and draw upon available options in their biographies and cultural milieus to fashion alternative, often multiple, identities. For sociologists of ethnicity such as Scourby, this self-becoming makes the cultural ties connecting a group tenuous. A community’s cohesion recedes, and commitment to ethnic institutions attenuates, raising the specter of so-called ethnic devolution and contributing to the cultural demise of the collective. Hence the notion of ethnic identity in crisis. Turning to this question in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when scholars were speaking about the “twilight of ethnicity” among European Americans, Scourby situated US Greek ethnicity at the crossroads. She defined Greek Americans as an ethnoreligious group whose institutions produced cohesion and enhanced continuity. Here, Scourby’s main thesis remains unchanged. She asserts that “we continue to see evidence of the enduring function of ethnicity in providing a reference point for a sense of rootedness and belonging” (22). But as early as the 1990s, she expressed concern that prospects for the survival of Greek American culture had begun to “look bleak” (1994, 129). It was this concern that motivated the writing of The Vanishing Greek Americans. Scourby discusses several oft-cited factors contributing to a trajectory of loss: the small number of Greek Americans, assimilation, intermarriage, reduced influx of immigrants, and the movement toward the development of pan-Orthodoxy among Orthodox Christians in the United States. Trends toward secularization and the privatization of identity weaken ethnic ties and pose a challenge to the community’s coherence. Scourby does not lament the community’s [End Page 215] internal diversity, but instead discusses those cultural forces that disempower the group, proposing a comprehensive means of ethnic survival in a rapidly diversifying community. The notion of vanishing expressed in the book’s title works rhetorically to add a sense of urgency to her call for action to reproduce Greek American identity and preserve the collective. This slim volume consists of six short chapters, a 2008 introduction by the author, and a foreword by historian Alexander Kitroeff. Chapter 1, “The Greek Americans,” identifies the small size of the Greek American demographic—they represent “less than one-half of one percent (0.4)” of the US population—as a source of vulnerability (20). It also discusses Greek Americans in the context of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s, including the Black Athena controversy. Chapter 2, “Greek American Institutions,” identifies ethnic patriarchy as “a community liability” (36) and protests the exclusion of women from leadership positions in major organizations such as the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA). Scourby notes that AHEPA’s governing board does not “include women who are part of the organization’s Auxiliary wing” (38). One of the strongest chapters in the book is Chapter 3, “The Church,” which draws on the scholarship of Eva Katafygiotou-Topping to make a case for the increased participation of women in liturgical life. Chapter 4, “Community Reverberations Pan-Orthodoxy: A Survey,” discusses Greek Orthodox attitudes regarding the unification of ethnic churches “into one single American Orthodox Church” (63), and also includes a discussion of Greek “ethnic vilification” in the US media. Chapter 5, “An Overview of Greece Past/Present,” features portraits of internationally renowned Greek American and Greek diaspora artists such as Dimitri Mitropoulos, Maria Callas, and C. P. Cavafy as examples of modern Greek achievement outside Greece. The book concludes with Chapter 6, “A Compendium,” which explores a wide assortment of Greek American institutional and cultural matters, including the challenges confronting the Hellenic College/Holy Cross School of Theology, the question of cooperation among Greek Americans, support for Modern Greek studies and the arts, and...

Uma dramaturgia da violência: os filmes de João Canijo, de Daniel Ribas

Ribas propõe a noção de dramaturgia da violência nos filmes de João Canijo, resultante do diálogo intertextual que cruza a tragédia grega e o melodrama americano e concretizada na representação de um imaginário português contemporâneo, analisado a partir dos conceitos de não-inscrição (José Gil) e do recalcado (Eduardo Lourenço).

Greek Music in America ed. by Tina Bucuvalas

Reviewed by: Greek Music in America ed. by Tina Bucuvalas Dafni Tragaki (bio) Tina Bucuvalas, editor, Greek Music in America. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 2019. Pp. xii + 467. 105 illustrations. Paper $30.00. Greek Music in America is a collection of essays edited by Tina Bucuvalas, curator of art and historical resources with the City of Tarpon Springs, Florida, who has also served as a folklorist and director of the Florida Department of State. The book is meant to serve as a foundation for the study of Greek American music, which is described in the introductory chapter as an essential medium for the poetics of the Greek American diasporic community (3). This opening chapter, co-authored by Bucuvalas and Stavros K. Frangos, one of the most renowned experts in Greek American music culture, offers a broad overview of Greek music in America from 1880 to 2015. Thereafter, the book is structured in four sections organized according to historical periods and summarizing valuable information about musicians, record labels and recording activity, genres, instrument makers, performance venues, and contexts. As an overview of its subject, Greek Music in America offers a basic text for any future research on the topic by ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars. [End Page 568] Part One, "Musical Genres, Style and Content," gathers essays, mostly published between 1981 and 2008, by pioneering authors in the field. The essays involve a wide range of topics: Greek Orthodox liturgical music (Frank Desby); the café aman musical tradition (Roderick Conway Morris); the amanes genre (Gail Holst-Warhaft); a comparison between rebetiko song and the blues that expands the geographical focus to Australia's Greek music scene (Stathis Gauntlett); the life and career of one of the most outstanding Greek musicians, George Katsaros, documenting the powerful networking of traditions by the international record industry (Frangos); the exploration of the place of spoken interjections in 78–rpm gramophone recordings of Greek songs (Michael G. Kaloyanides); and the intersection of Greek and Turkish song in America (Joseph G. Graziosi). Since several of the reprinted essays are apparently less accessible today, Part One largely serves the re-surfacing of carefully selected, highly influential archival, folklore, anthropological, literary, historical, and ethnomusicological published research on the topic, while inspiring their critical reconsideration and theoretical reframing. The next section, "Places," collects chapters originally published between 1985 and 2012 (according to the information given in the Notes), including Sotirios (Sam) Chianis' essay on Greek folk music in New York, Anna Caraveli's ethnography of glendi performances, and Anna Lomax Wood's public folklore research on diasporic Kalymnian spongers' musical traditions focusing on the family of Nikitas Tsimouris. A new chapter by Panayotis League on Kalymnian music and dance in Tarpon Springs provides a fresh ethnomusicological perspective and raises questions of performance, authenticity, gender, embodiment, identification, and belonging. The acclaimed historical recordings researcher Dick Spottswood opens Part Three, "Delivering the Music: Recording Companies and Performance Venues," with a chapter offering a highly informative documentation of Greek music recordings from 1896 to 1937. The chapter by Meletios Pouliopoulos, a dedicated music archivist, deals with the apparently understudied topic of Greek piano rolls in the United States and provides a useful starting point for those interested in studying Greek American music's technoculture in the 1920s and 1930s. Anthony Shay's chapter recounts a choreographer's encounter with Greek folk dancing, while the essay by Nick Pappas (originally published in 1981) is a lively account of New York's Greek nightclubs during the 1980s. The final section, "Profiles," offers biographical accounts of Greek-American popular musicians, instrument-makers, and individuals actively involved in the music scene; it thus forms a sort of encyclopedic corpus of entries authored by dedicated specialists. The closing Appendix by Frangos provides a detailed [End Page 569] and systematic outline of Greek music collections in the United States that is a much-needed compilation and description of the available archival sources. Greek Music in America substantially contributes to the organization of relevant scholarship and paves the way for further investigations while hoping to attract a wider readership. Though the quantity of recent research is rather disproportionate, the book is likely to stimulate interest...

The 99th Battalion

5 w o r k s i n p r o g r e s s The 99th Battalion Kyle Ward and Odd S. Lovoll Our forthcoming book, Viking Battalion: The Norwegian-­ American’s War against Hitler, looks at the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), which was a unit made up specifically of Norwegian Americans and Norwegians in exile. While this unique unit would serve in Europe and be connected to some of the most famous battles and events in that theater of war, it quickly disappeared from the history books after the war ended. The 99th was originally formed by the U.S. War Department in the summer of 1942. It was not the only “ethnic” unit the U.S. military tried to create during the war; others included the 100th (Japanese American), the 101st (Austrian American ), and the 122nd (Greek American) Infantry Battalions. While the 101st and 122nd never really came to complete fruition, the 100th, along with its counterpart , the 442nd (made up of second-­ generation Japanese Americans), went on to receive a great deal of recognition for their service. For their part, the 99ers were originally organized at Camp Ripley, Minnesota , and then sent down to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, for the first few months of 6 works in progress their existence. Then the army sent this group to Camp Hale, Colorado, to begin an extremely rigorous training regime in the high altitudes of the Rocky Mountains, where they were trained in mountain climbing, skiing, and winter survival. During their training in Colorado, the 99th was reviewed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the commander-­ in-­ chief. A small part of our book will investigate this brief but highly publicized encounter. We believe that this small unit was highlighted by the president, and given a great deal of publicity, in order to send a message to Germany that the United States was preparing to invade Norway. If the Figure 1. Men of the 99th during their training at Fort Snelling, Minnesota in the fall of 1942. After organizing at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, the 99th briefly trained at Fort Snelling before moving on to finish their training in Colorado. Author Kyle Ward’s personal collection. 7 the 99th battalion message was received and believed by Germany, Hitler would be forced to keep his 350,000 soldiers, plus their supporting planes, tanks, and ships, in Norway, rather than deploying them to other likely continental invasion sites, such as the Normandy region in France. After training at Camp Hale, the 99th was sent to England and then, rather than going to Norway, actually landed on the Normandy beaches about two weeks after the initial invasion. From there, this relatively unknown group of highly-­ trained soldiers was sent across Europe, and participated in some of the most important and significant events in the European theater. A quick scan of their service record shows that they were at Cherbourg, held off SS attacks at the Battle of the Bulge, saved some of the survivors of the Malmedy massacre, guarded the gold and artwork found at Merkers Mine (depicted in the book and movie Monuments Men), and helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. Figure 2. Two soldiers standing by a sign at Camp Hale, Colorado. The 99th would train at Camp Hale from December 1942 to August 1943, where they were put through some of the most strenuous training the U.S. Army had to offer. Author Kyle Ward’s personal collection. 8 works in progress After the final surrender of Germany in May of 1945, the 99th was finally sent to Norway, where they were given the honor of serving as King Haakon VII’s honor guard upon his return from exile. While the men were excited simply to finally get to Norway, some official duties remained, such as helping to remove the remaining German forces and working with Norwegian police and military to get them reestablished. On a more personal note, they also played a lot of soccer against Norwegian teams, spent time reconnecting with immediate or distant family , and for a few dozen, meeting their future wives. Figure 3. Men of the 99th with medical training were part of the original group...

Three Elenis: Archaeologies of the Greek American Village Home

Three Elenis: Archaeologies of the Greek American Village Home

Roots, Return Narratives, Reclaiming “European Americans”: A Review Essay

Evangelia Kindinger’s Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives and Theodora Patrona’s Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature discuss identity-making in Greek American and Italian American texts that narrate return to the historical homeland. Their interest lies in the poetics—how the returnee Self is constructed in a text—and politics—the impact of these constructions on collective belonging. Both authors mark return as a creative, self-transformative process, a fashioning of identity that is built systematically and achieved copiously, a product of commitment and intensive investment in the value of roots. Writing return also mobilizes an interest in rendering women’s experiences visible and rewriting gender with the aim of empowering diaspora women. There is interest too in the ways in which extratextual economies, such as the publishing industry, and dominant discourses of belonging shape the meaning of roots. In this review essay, I closely analyze how Homebound and Return Narratives bring together the making of textual selves with the political implications of these constructions, and I discuss the way the two books contribute to the (re)thinking of the category “European Americans” as well as its wider social valence, including its place in the US academy. Further, I build on their approaches to the topic of roots to offer a wider reflection on what is at stake in writing and reading return. I make a case that this particular historical moment, when diaspora return is valorized by states and corporations for the purpose of development as well as nation-building, calls for an approach to return that centers on the ethics of commitments to home and homeland and a politics beyond the Self-Other dialectic. The notion of transnational citizenship offers a productive route to chart the ethicopolitical facets associated with the claiming of roots.

Transatlantic repatriation: Stigma management of second-generation Italian and Greek American women ‘returning home’

Based on 30 narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Greek and Italian women who have migrated from the United States to their ‘ancestral homelands’ of Greece and Italy, our article explores nuances of their stigma management by focusing on the interaction between their pre-repatriation past and post-repatriation present and the spaces of inclusion and exclusion. Adopting the method of narrative-biographic analysis, we present three detailed case studies of repatriated women – organized as composite biographies – to illuminate from different angles the process of stigma management and the phenomenon of stigma mobility. Highlighting the dynamics of the reproduction of the diasporic patriarchy through repatriation to the ‘ancestral homeland’, we introduce and elaborate on the concept ‘nativity voucher’ in reference to ethno-cultural resources that repatriated people use to facilitate their spaces of inclusion.

Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature by Theodora D. Patrona

Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature by Theodora D. Patrona

Theodora Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature

Theodora Patrona, Return Narratives. Ethnic Space in Late-Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Pp. 209. ISBN: 9781611479959 Sostene M. Zangari In his poem “Heritage,” Countee Cullen articulates the cultural void affecting African-American intellectuals who, denied direct access to their ancestral home, were not able to turn its culture and traditions into that ‘usable past’ that could provide the foundations for construct...

Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives by Evangelia Kindinger

Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives by Evangelia Kindinger

Genealogies of sense and sound: Home recordings and Greek American identity

Abstract This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, I explore the ways that people’s interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveal that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community’s material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘family’ in the immigrant context.