Contours of white ethnicity popular ethnography and the making of usable pasts in Greek America - Anagnostou, Yiorgos (Ohio University Press, 2009)
Includes bibliographical references and index
The politics and poetics of popular ethnography : folk immigrant, ethnic, and racial pasts in history and discourse -- Whither collective ethnic identities? White ethnics and the slippery terrain of European Americanness -- Whose ethnic community? Gendered pasts and polyphonies of belonging -- Interrogating ethnic whiteness, building interracial solidarity : popular ethnography as cultural critique -- Ethnicity as choice? Roots and identity as a narrative project -- Redirecting ethnic options : historical routes of heritage
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