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

Abstract

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.