Description:
Winner: Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies
Promotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The work moves beyond the "single group" approach--an approach that privileges the study of ethnic singularity--to explore instead two ethnic groups in relation to each other in the broader context of the United States. The chapters bring into focus transcultural interfaces and inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. This co-edited volume contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. The book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, and film studies, as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as that of popular culture, including visual representations (documentary, film, TV series) and "low brow" crime fiction. It includes analysis of literature. It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories, translocal interconnections in the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. This volume is the first of its kind in initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.Brief description: Andonis Piperoglou is an adjunct research fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia. He is a cultural historian who examines the interrelationship between migration, race, and ethnicity across settler-colonial worlds and is interested in bringing Mediterranean and Pacific histories into conversation. He has published widely in various scholarly outputs, including the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies, History Australia, Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters, Australian Historical Studies, and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. He currently serves on the Executive of the International Australian Studies Association and was recently awarded an Australian National University Herbert and Valmae Freilich Early Career Research Grant. Andonis is also a cofounder of the Australian Migration History Network, Australia's chief national body for migration history.
Review Quotes: A major contribution to ethnic studies, this book offers a much needed comparative (transnational) approach to the investigation of Italian and Greek American ethnic groups with ties across several countries. It challenges the academy's feckless characterization of these groups as 'white, ' European, and superficially ethnic. The contributors point out the continuing vitality of Greek and Italian American cultures and most importantly, locate their affinities in a shared Mediterranean culture of origin. The book provides a rightfully dynamic view of how ethnic subjects today actually project and symbolically deploy their identitarian negotiations in a variety of media.---William Boelhower, author of Atlantic Studies, Prospects and Challenges and Immigrant Autobiography in the United States, Revised and Enlarged Edition.