Model Americans, Quintessential Greeks: Ethnic Success and Assimilation in Diaspora

Anagnostou, Yiorgos

doi:10.1353/dsp.2011.0046

Cited by 21 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The Asian American "Model Minority" is a myth that serves to divide and conquer people of color in the United States. 17 Anagnostou (2003) writes on "Model Americans" in Diaspora journal: on the "price" of certain kinds of identification in the assimilation context, which have psychological costs as well as particular advantages.…”

Section: Time Is a Circle: San Gabriel Valley Camentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations

Banh

2019

Genealogy

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According to scholar and Professor Wang Gungwu, there are three categories of Chinese overseas documents: formal (archive), practical (print media), and expressive (migrant writings such as poetry). This non-fiction creative essay documents what Edna Bonacich describes as an “middleman minority” family and how we have migrated to four different nation-city states in four generations. Our double minority status in one country where we were discriminated against helped us psychologically survive in another country. My family history ultimately exemplifies the unique position “middleman minority” families have in the countries they migrate to and how the resulting discrimination that often accompanies this position can work as a psychological advantage when going to a new country. We also used our cultural capital to survive in each new country. In particular, this narrative highlights the lasting psychological effects of the transnational migration on future generations. There is a wall of shame, fear, and traumas in my family’s migration story that still pervades today. My family deals with everything with silence, obfuscation, and anger. It has taken me twenty years to recollect a story so my own descendants can know where we came from. Thus, this is a shadow history that will add to the literature on Sino-Southeast Asian migration and remigration out to the United States. Specifically, my family’s migration began with my grandfather leaving Guangdong, China to Saigon, Vietnam (1935), to Hong Kong, (1969) (then a British Colony), and eventually to the United States (1975). This article explains why my family migrated multiple times across multiple generations before eventually ending up in California. Professor Wang urges librarians, archivists, and scholars to document and preserve the Chinese migrants’ expressive desires of migrant experiences and this expressive memoir piece answers that call.

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Section: Time Is a Circle: San Gabriel Valley Camentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations

Banh

2019

Genealogy

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“…As Karampetsos indicates, the reporting of immigrants in the nation's mainstream press was not "monolithic nor particularly consistent " (1998:62). Under certain circumstances, Greek immigrants could and did receive positive coverage, particularly in regards to the "model ethnic" (Anagnostou 2003). Alexander Pantages himself was the beneficiary of benign reporting throughout his show business career, often revealing him to be a hard-working and honest entrepreneur (Tarrach 1973:25).…”

Section: Portrayals Of Immigrants Hollywood and Court Trialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the racialized hothouse that was America at the turn of the twentieth century, Greeks and other immigrant groups experienced the ethnicization of their race against the supposedly more "colored" minorities: they became "white" against the rainbow backdrop of African, Asian, and Native Americans (Anagnostou 2009). But this process did not entirely remove discriminatory social stigmas associated with immigrants; it simply created the social conditions by which the "ideal ethnic" might be more acceptable and therefore less culturally threatening to the country's dominant ethnic group (Anagnostou 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

Poor Greek to "Scandalous" Hollywood Mogul: Alexander Pantages and the Anti-Immigrant Narratives of William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner

Lagos¹

2012

mgs

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Second Wave" immigrants poured into the United States between 1880 and 1924 and stirred nativist hostility against the foreign-born, a sentiment already present in American culture in the nineteenth century. This hostility is captured in the newspaper coverage of the rape case of Alexander Pantages who in 1929 was accused of sexually molesting a 17-year-old female dancer. The reporting of the case by the Los Angeles Examiner highlights not only the use of the tropes of the "foreign-born," but also those of the "movie mogul" to tap into social anxieties over the wave of new immigrants and their supposed domination of the movie industry. The demonization of Pantages through visual and rhetorical constructions by the Examiner marks the boundaries and contestational territory of "white ethnicity" in a socially turbulent America. The biased news coverage exposes normative journalistic practices that favor the highly dramatic, while reifying the existing hierarchal social order and confining the nation's immigrants within narrow cultural norms.

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“…Construing diversity in this manner, the Encyclopedia proceeds to valorize acceptable differences, positing cultural traits (rather than political economies of race) as the explanation of socioeconomic inequalities. This ideology of ethnic success endures as a defining element in hegemonic self-representation of white ethnics such as Greek Americans (see Anagnostou, 2003). In critiquing 'the blurring of biology and culture' with ethnicity in sociological and political discourses in the US and Britain, Anne-Marie Fortier (1994: 221) shows how the politics of 'ethnic revivalism' in the 1960s 'tightened the link between ethnicity and identity' (Fortier, 1994: 215).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A critique of symbolic ethnicity

Anagnostou

2009

Ethnicities

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This article undertakes a critical analysis of symbolic ethnicity, an influential sociological paradigm of white ethnicity in the US. It highlights a fundamental contradiction that is present in the work of one of its most influential proponents, sociologist Mary Waters: the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the operation of choice in the making of ethnic identities, followed by the methodological neglect of the cultural production of identity. The article argues that this methodological oversight embeds symbolic ethnicity in a wider discourse on choice as a constitutive element of American identity. Also, it shows how the privileging of choice makes it possible to achieve a vision of American multiculturalism based on the dialectical synthesis of two historically competing ideologies: the concept of America as a melting pot and a cultural mosaic. Showing that symbolic ethnicity conflates culture, identity and ancestry, and noting that it undervalues the social valence of white ethnicity, the article concludes with a discussion of how to recover ethnic identity analytically as an enduring, politically significant disposition and practice.

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Model Americans, Quintessential Greeks: Ethnic Success and Assimilation in Diaspora

Cited by 21 publications

References 52 publications

“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations

“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations

Poor Greek to "Scandalous" Hollywood Mogul: Alexander Pantages and the Anti-Immigrant Narratives of William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner

A critique of symbolic ethnicity

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