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Greek Diaspora. Greek Diaspora in the US faces the challenges of: - How to reconcile the claim of integration with the (American) nation with a simultaneous claim to the authentic cultural and racial Greekness .
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Greek Diaspora • Greek Diaspora in the US faces the challenges of: - How to reconcile the claim of integration with the (American) nation with a simultaneous claim to the authentic cultural and racialGreekness. • They adopt different strategies of assimilation and and at the same time sustaining difference. • emphasizing their distinctiveness but at the same managing assimilation in the mainstream American culture.
Greek Diaspora • They developed narratives of national belonging (to America and Greece) while also appropriating the cultural capital of classical Greece as its own ethnic heritage (Hellenism). • However, Greek America still explicitly experiences a deep-seated anxiety over its ethnic identity and how their difference is perceived and received by others.
Greek Diaspora • Successful Greek Americans exhibit a minority's awareness of their ethnic location as a limitation on mainstream recognition. • Successful Greek Americans, in an increasingly multicultural America, only belatedly feel comfortable with openly promoting their ethnic culture when they enjoy economic success.
Greek Diaspora • Greek Americans are aware that they can always be subjected to the power of the dominant society, and be re-ethnicized as foreign, despite their claims and protests. • Both appeared as products of Greek-American self-representation that circulated widely through the American national media
Greek Diaspora • Such a strategy indicates Greek America's quest for social distinction through an articulation of middle-class status and culture, particularly the appropriation of the discourse of Hellenism. • Confronted with multiculturalism, assimilated Greek America undertakes a project of cultural (re)production through self-documentation.
Greek Diaspora • The Greek Americans is part of the PBS Heritage Specials series, which features a wide range of ethnic and racial groups, including Armenian, Chinese, Cuban, German, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Mexican, Polish, and Puerto Rican Americans.
Greek Diaspora • The Greek Americans underlines the struggle and success of a diaspora group. • It presents Greek Americans as who "started at the bottom," overcame host state hostility and discrimination, and through hard work earned "a special place on the American dream scheme. • This documentary participates in this process to produce and legitimize, an ideological consensus on what constitutes a Greek-American identity.
Greek Diaspora • The documentary dwells on narratives about hardships overcome, ethnic pride, and success, juxtaposed with images of Greek immigrants at work. • The Greek Americans is important in terms of politics of ethnic (re)-production and the national discourse on multiculturalism.
Greek Diaspora • Many Greek Americans erect symbolic boundaries to disassociate themselves from the perceived "foreignness" of the immigrants. • This indicates the extent to which immigrant culture is often considered a sign of radical difference, vulnerable to the stigma America attaches to its non-assimilated minorities
Greek Diaspora • Along with other minorities, early Greek Americans were subjected to negative stereotypes and felt their powerful material and psychological consequences. • Stereotypes, "are both instrument and symbol of hegemony.” • Greek Americans have learned this lesson well. In spite of their eagerness to conform and distance themselves, they can always be subjected to the power off the dominant society to demarcate boundaries between the domestic and the foreign.
Greek Diaspora • Paradoxically, while Greek Americans currently describe themselves as "super Americans," "honorary Americans," and "disciples ofthe American dream," they still operate within the logic of minority discourse. • Greeks, along with other southeastern European immigrants of the time, were haunted by racialized theories and practices challenging their mental and racial fitness for equal inclusion in the nation. • The immigrants were seen as entities alien to the national body, ultimately unassimilable. • Furthermore, racial nativism dismissed wholesale the immigrants' campaign to present the Greeks as heirs of ancient Greek civilization as a source of prestige as well as a strategy to distance Greek immigrants from their southeastern counterparts.
Greek Diaspora • American identity, is "safely and easily received" by the native-born by virtue of birth and descent, "but [it is] something that foreign-born workers would have to strive long and hard to achieve." • The transformation of wage labor, a class location associated with non-whiteness, into middle-class respectability, a sign of republican "whiteness," mirrors racial inclusion. • In a society confronted by the potential conflict between "oneness" and "many-ness," the centering of identity on mainstream middle-class values enables ethnic and racial groups to stand for the American cultural whole.
Greek Diaspora • Claiming the ancient Greeks as their authentic ancestorswas a necessity for those Greeks who were already American citizens or aspired to become so, since it was their ancestral identity that ultimately determined their full access to an American political and national (racial) identity. • Thus, though forced to forget their past, the immigrants had to reflect on how to rewrite their ancestral ties in a manner compatible with the dictates of racist and republican nationalism.
Greek Diaspora • In a host society positing the ideals of classical Greece as its cultural and political model, the immigrant claim was plain: as racial descendants and cultural heirs of classical Greece, Greek immigrants were not only endowed with the potential to embrace "Americanness," they had access to "Americanness.“ • Greek America's middle-class status—achieved through small business ownership—served as a mirror of racial fitness and therefore as a criterion for inclusion in the American nation. • Socioeconomic mobility served as a necessary sign of immigrant "racial endurance" and enabled access to American fraternal organizations positing middle-class status as a badge of respectability.
Greek Diaspora • In this dynamic, assimilation pulls Greek America within the orbit of power structures, mainstream institutions, and decision-making processes, rewarding members of the group with social approval and prestige. • Rather than viewing assimilation negatively, a group engages tactically with dominant cultural expectations of conformity. • In this view of diaspora, creating a home in the host society becomes as important as tracing past origins.
Greek Diaspora • Cultural distancing as a direct outcome of immigration is accomplished by aligning the Greek-American self along values privileged by the West—individualism, discipline, order, and equality
Armenian Diaspora • The estimated number of Armenians according to the host countries: • InRussia (nearly 2 million), the United States (800,000), Georgia (400,000), France (250,000), the Ukraine (150,000), Lebanon(105,000), Iran (100,000), Syria (70,000), Argentina (60,000), Turkey (60,000), Canada (40,000), and Australia (30,000). • Diasporic elites,along with the diasporic institutions, organizations, and associationsthey lead, have beenunusuaIly important to for the Armenian diaspora. These institutions and elites have done philanthropIc, cultural, and political works.
Armenian Diaspora • The organized, institutionally mobilized and sustained connections, combining materialand cultural exchange among diasporic communities as well as between the diaspora and the homeland, are key components of "diasporic" social formation. • Such institutions constitute a diasporic civil society that nurtures and sustains the public sphere of debate and culture. • The diasporic public sphere has until recently remained distinct from the largerpublic sphere of its host societiesby conscious cultural territorialization.
Armenian Diaspora • Armenians managed a production of identities through both aesthetic and mass cultural practices. • Such production and contestation are conducted in old media andnew, in the increasing proliferation of newspapersand books, in radio and television programs, in concerts and commemorativeevents, on stages and inexhibition and lecture halls, and recently also on the internet.
Armenian Diaspora • The transformation of Armenian exilic nationalism to diasporic transnationalism involves many institutions and does not happen evenly, or equally observable in all the communities of the Armeniandiaspora. • The change is happening over time at an uneven pace, depending crucially on location.
Armenian Diaspora • Greater engagementwith (I) the "host nation,“ (2) with the homeland, easily accessible after thecollapse of the Soviet Union;(3) the global, through Internet and satellite. • Shifting relationship between the diaspora and the homeland. There was a constantly evolving interaction between the diaspora's and thehomeland's government. • Even during the Sovietperiod, homeland drew both on the Communist sympathies of working-class Armenians in diaspora (especially France) ; and on powerful sentimental attachments to the one portion of the 'homeland that had survived the genocide.
Armenian Diaspora • After 1965, a policy of rapprochement between homeland and diaspora slowlydeveloped and has continued with many reversalsin the post-soviet period. • The policies of post-Communist Armenian governments have sometimes been problematic for many diasporan organizations. • That they have provedproblematic even after the fall of the Soviet Union indicates thatearlier difficulties were not caused entirely by the nature of theCommunist regime but, rather, are inherent in the struggle between 'the homeland's desire to direct organized diasporic life and the resistance to such direction by the diaspora's institutions and leaders.
Armenian Diaspora • The turning point started in 1965, during the 50thanniversary of the launching by Ottoman Turkey of the Genocide that had led to the creation of the new diasporas. • A genocide memorial was authorized, constructed, andbecame a site of pilgrimage, drawing homeland visitors and diaspora tourists, whose numbers increased annually after 1965.
Armenian Diaspora • After independence, a sudden increase in contact between the homeland and the diaspora was witnessed. • One consequence of these changes was a conferencethat took place in Armenia in September 1999, when 800 diasporadelegates from fifty-two countriesto discuss the future of the Armeniantransnation, whose quasi-official recognition was marked by this conference.
Armenian Diaspora • As in every society, and as also in every diasporiccommunity, the majority of the Armenian diaspora population is not routinely and directly involved in the discursive and political life of its institutions. • In the Armenian diaspora, it is the minority, the dominant elite who dominate institutions but the majority also participate.
Armenian Diaspora • As the range of different diasporic activities indicate, diasporic institutionsengage in both cultural and political work. • Some diasporic institutions have power in the narrowly political sense; they influence political events in the host nation and dominate major communalinstitutions. • Many have productive power in the sensethat they are involved in extending social services, on the one hand, and the discursive production of meaning and identity, on the other.
Armenian Diaspora • Only a few of the major institutions of the Armenian diasporaconsistently work in one arena. • The Armenian Assembly of Americaand the Armenian National Committee of America, the two large Armenian-American lobbies operating in Washington, DC. • In host states where Armenian diasporic political activity of anysort is forbidden and punished by imprisonment or worse, diasporic life becomes primarily religious, but it stillremains deeply involved with language, discourse, and culture.
Jewish Diaspora • There is a growing Jewish-American involvement in the battle over the definition of Israel's Jewish identity as the struggle between secular and religious Jews or between "Israeliness" and “Jewishness.” • The struggle over Israel's Jewish character has become one of the most contentious issues within the American Jewish community, which is connected to its own identity.
Jewish Diaspora • While some of the new generation of American Jews have become distant and even alienated from Israel in recent years, others have rediscovered a mobilization in the contest over Israel's Jewish identity. • Having discovered that today's Israel does not always accord with the values embraced in America, American Jews attempt to shape of Israeli reality such as redirecting Jewish diasporic fund raising away from general funds for Israel to targeted assistance of institutions and programs aimed at promoting tolerance, democracy, and religious pluralism.
Jewish Diaspora • Tensions over the meaning of Jewish identity in general, and the position of the Israeli state in defining the boundaries of Jewish belonging in particular, may be better understood if the below factors are considered: • first, developments American-Jewish identity separate from the homeland element; second, American-Jewish identity as influenced by homeland related affairs; third, the changes in diasporic identity stemming from 'changing American foreign policy goals.
Jewish Diaspora • During the early years of the Cold War, diasporic voices and transnational connections were generally permitted to those groups whose goals fit the larger American foreign policy agenda of fighting Communism. • From the late 1940s until the early 1960s American Jewry developed its identity and gained social acceptance as a result of the opening provided by the post-war "golden age."
Jewish Diaspora • From the mid1960s until the late 1970s one can identify the "Israelization“ of Jewish-American identity. The domestic assertion of Jewish ethnic identity, which grew as a result of the Civil Rights movement and its recognition of minority cultures, took a dramatic turn after Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six-Day War.
Jewish Diaspora • Beginning in the early 1980s and continuing until the early 1990s, a time of growing tensions between Israel, and the Diaspora in terms of the nature of each community and culture; Israeli divisions over politics and identity increased; and a weaker identity of the foreign policy interests of Israel and the United States emerged, especially toward the end of the Cold War.
Jewish Diaspora • The period stretching from the first Oslo peaceI agreement in 1993 to early 2000 has been a time of transformation, both internationally and internally, within both the Israeli and American-Jewish communities. • It is influenced by the global surge of democratic values and pluralism; by peace negotiations in the Middle East; by the lack of coherence in American foreign policy goals and strategic interests in the region.
Jewish Diaspora Herzl gave little attention to what sort of Jewish identity would develop after the attainment of sovereignty inside the homeland. In mainstream Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationhood remained vague and closely tied to religious affiliation, as it is impossible to separate the two in Judaism. Since Zionism prescribes Jewish identity as a prerequisite for membership in the Jewish state, it fans into a "trap" whereby religion remains the only characteristic for defining such an identity.
Jewish Diaspora • Israel did not immediately become the center of attention of Jewish life in America. In the late ,1940s and the 1950s, Jews in the United States focused instead on integrating themselves. • Only with the move to suburbia did synagogues begin to grow and proliferate, and Jewish communal institutions to thrive. As religion took a more central place in American public life, Jews in Urban America began to enter the mainstream but they did so in an American way. Synagogue services and organizational structures borrowed heavily from mainline Protestant practices, with the creation of Sunday schools, sisterhoods, etc.
Jewish Diaspora • Growing rates of intermarriage and other manifestations of assimilation became clear trends by the 1960s, developments that caused some in the Jewish community to turn more to Conservative and Orthodox worship as a means of holding on to their Jewish identity.
Jewish Diaspora • 1950s were characterized by the American desire to win the goodwill and support of the Arab world in an effort to contain the Soviet Union. • This meant that Israel was excluded from membership in regional security alliances initiated by the United States. The weakness of Jewish-American leaders in the face of US criticism of Israel during this period.
Jewish Diaspora • In the late 1950s that the Jewish lobby began to enjoy some- success in Washington, as American policy makers began to recognize Israel as a strategic asset within a turbulent and changing Arab regional environment. • The 1960s, and especially the 1967 war, are regarded by many observers as a watershed in terms of Diaspora-Israeli relations. The fact that ethnicity was becoming more legitimate in American public life at that time led to the growing politicization of US Jews and brought to the fore the diasporic component of their identity.
Jewish Diaspora • Starting in the late 1970s, with the rise to power of the Likud party and the growing divisions within Israel regarding peace with the Arabs and the Palestinian issue, diasporic political positions, became more diverse with regard to Israeli policies and in the Middle East. • The diaspora also began to assert its voice in Israeli affairs and on issues affecting Jewish identity within Israel. • With the Palestinian Intifada, the diversification and erosion of diaspora support for Israel became evident.
Jewish Diaspora • The growing gap between Israel and American Jews-in terms of politics, culture, and their interpretations of Jewish life-was intensified. • Mobilization of the Diaspora had reached a dangerous level when AIPAC and other Jewish organizations felt so empowered that they began to adopt an independent foreign policy agenda in the Middle East. • It was in the late 1980s that the pattern of automatic diasporic support for Israel began to erode.
Jewish Diaspora • For Israeli politics and society, the Jewish-American Diaspora is the largest, most active, and most significant of many diasporas. • Moreover, issues of ethno-religious identity are more prominent highly controversial and dynamic between American Jews and Israel than between Israel and its other diasporic kin. • One can see nascent signs of change in the direction of infusing traditionalist Israeli Judaism with liberal American Judaism as an alternative middle way between aggressive ultra-Orthodoxy and unqualified secularism in a process that draws Diaspora and Israeli Judaism closer together.
