Diasporic Presences, Pedagogical Prospects:
Toward a Transnational Greek Language Classroom

by Yiorgos Anagnostou

Abstract

Greece-centered texts—a central component of teaching modern Greek language courses in the United States—do more than acquaint students with the history and culture of the country. They function as potential sources for cultural identification, particularly perhaps for heritage students. In this function, teaching material so oriented stand to (re)produce a particular mode of diaspora identity—a prevailing one in state and popular discourses—construed as connection with the historical homeland. But evidence from our classrooms indicates that heritage students undertake class projects which engage with another facet of their diasporic identities, namely family migration histories and stories, cultural betweenness, or experience-based comparisons of Greek and Greek American culture among others. This interest, among other reasons I will explain, motivates researchers to call for the incorporation of diasporic material in our language (and culture) classes.

Students’ and researchers’ interests then move toward decentering the classroom as they orient attention to questions of immigration and diaspora subjectivities, including bilingualism. They introduce a disjuncture between (a) the prevailing (to the best of my knowledge) Greece-based pedagogy and (b) the U.S.-based diasporic experience, confronting the privileging—one might say normalization—of the former modality in our pedagogies.

This situation raises several interrelated challenges for educators. Given that cultural stories and histories are steeped in ideology (explaining immigrant mobility, establishing cultural and linguistic “authenticity” as well as “creole-based” hierarchies between Helladic and diasporic Greeks), what modes of knowledge do we need to meaningfully engage with students’ interpretation of diaspora, family and self? If we are willing to consider the place of Greek American material in our teaching repertoire, what aspects do we select to incorporate and for what purpose? But how do we introduce this diasporic pedagogy to instructors and apply it, when practitioners of modern Greek studies and diaspora studies are often in limited (or non-existent) dialogue? If we agree that it is ripe time to launch this long overdue conversation, is it possible that the modern Greek language classroom could serve as a starting building block for a broader cross-fertilization between modern Greek and diaspora studies? The presentation will reflect on these questions, making a gesture toward shifting the language classroom from a nation-centric to a transnational space of learning and inquiry.

***

(The following is a considerably expanded version of my talk at the 11 ^th Biennial MGSA Pedagogy Workshop entitled, The Future of Greek Language and Culture Pedagogy: New Challenges and Opportunities. [Theme: Cultural studies / literature / and history courses.] Hosted by the Boston University Department of Classical Studies, Modern Greek Program. October 25, 2025.)

I would like to thank the committee for opening the workshop to the theme of cultural studies, an academic field which I should broadly outline for the purpose of establishing a common ground for conversation. Cultural studies examines how social institutions shape culture. How museums, for example, shape historical memory. In the context of this workshop, it would inquire how the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) historically has been engaging with the relation between modern Greek and diaspora studies. Cultural studies in Britain and the United States were revolutionary in the 1950s and 1960s in changing the way we think about culture. Culture no longer refers to shared values or attributes but to a contested field, where meaning about a subject is debated in connection to ideological interests and power relations. The question about what we mean by “Greek diaspora identity,” for example, is answered in a variety of ways with some renditions enjoying greater institutional support/power than others. Popular culture such as films, documentaries, novels, and songs, are analyzed not as autonomous objects but texts enmeshed in broader social discourses.

Cultural studies encourages researchers to interrogate exclusionary practices. Historically, U.S. modern Greek studies have privileged the study of Greece at the expense of diaspora studies and early on resisted the inclusion of Greek immigration and diaspora in their scope—a situation that for some time now the MGSA has been taking steps to address.

I place my talk within this framework in the context of the Greek language classroom. I see it as yet another occasion to advocate a closer interconnection between the two fields, redressing what I see as an artificial boundary between modern Greek and transnational diaspora studies. To follow the cultural studies perspective, this talk is a text participating in the discourse about the boundaries of modern Greek studies, a field which I see as inherently transnational.

I start with Karen Van Dyck’s work entitled The Language Question and the Diaspora (2009).Van Dyck considers the role of several prominent diaspora figures—Adamantios Korais, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannis Psycharis, among others—on the Greek language question. She notes the contrast between the multilingualism of these authors and their belief about the necessity of a national language. They maintained “that a unified language would help to bring about a unified nation and make possible a greater Greece” (191). But the position of these multilingual speakers reveals not only “concern for what kind of Greek a Greek should write … but also about their own insecurities over their own hybrid Greek” (193).

Confronted with a situation when polyglot subjects desire a monoglot Greece, Van Dyck concludes her essay with a point about the task of literary criticism. She alerts scholars “to read texts not only for what they say, but how they say it. Even when the explicit message seems quite rigid and nationalistic,” she writes, “the diasporic multilingualism of these diasporic texts suggests a sensitivity and an openness to change” (196). Diaspora linguistic hybridity presents the prospect of a subject not fully constituted by national ideology.

It is of relevance for my purposes here to think about Van Dyck’s insights—with some poetic license—in relation to our modern Greek language classroom, and in reference, first, to our heritage learners. If we were to talk to the students about their motivation to study Greek while asking them to use all the linguistic registers they have in their disposal we would most likely experience a mixture: Greeklish as the result of their exposure to two languages; vocabularies and grammars of regional dialects connected with family histories; passages of koine due to exposure to the Greek Orthodoxy liturgy and Sunday school; and probably fragments of Greek as it was spoken in the 1950s and 1960s. If we were to include Cypriot students, they would have contributed additional layers of linguistic diversity. If in this exercise we notice students display some hesitation or an apologetic tone about their Greek, it might be that they often feel defensive about this heteroglossia. National discourses of Greek identity render them less Greek—they are aware of being subjected to this devaluation. This is to say that we will be entering the political space of language intersecting with identity.

To listen to how students express their interest in the national language is to recognize their embeddedness in diasporic histories, experiences, and feelings. It is the recognition of this diasporic dimension in their lives that I wish to place at the center of the discussion. How might this centering affect the content and practices of curriculum design and pedagogy in our classes?

Heritage students are far from a homogeneous demographic, but it is safe to assume that most, to some degree, engage with biculturalism and degrees of bilingualism, which they negotiate in different ways depending on a variety of circumstances. A prevailing mode of diaspora discourse connects them with Greece. Their interest in folk and popular culture, their ancestral roots, history, classical heritage, customs and traditions, places them in relation to Greek regions and the nation. From this perspective, the language classroom most likely serves as a source of material for exploring, nuancing, even empowering these identifications without necessarily any dramatic changes in the curriculum.

But as I mentioned, there is another, less talked about, aspect of diasporic identities. It involves experiences and feelings transcending nation-centric categories. I cannot resist citing Cavafy here—from the poem Returning from Greece:

It’s time we admitted the truth:
we are Greeks also–what else are we?–
but with Asiatic tastes and feelings,
tastes and feelings
sometimes alien to Hellenism.

Diasporic identity defined in this manner presents an everyday reality for the next generation. It involves negotiations with cultural betweenness, sometimes painful when family or institutional expectations do not align with next generation preferences and ideology. College students might resort to the arts and the humanities to find a place of engaging cultural multiplicity. As one student puts it, “I often think my art is a way to bridge my two cultures and countries. I have learned to record memory, eyes and heart and camera wide open” (Vassiliou, 2021).

Diasporic identities operate in a cultural field of hierarchies of Greekness. It is not uncommon for students to be devalued as lesser Greeks because of limited linguistic and cultural competence (see Stewart 2006). An example from popular culture is the experience of Georgia, the Greek American heroine in the film My Life in Ruins (2009), whose claim to Greek identity is dismissed in Greece due to her alleged incapability of experiencing “true kefi.” Heritage students, at the same time, may hold erroneous assumptions about Greek American history, inflected by the ideology of struggle and success and the stereotype of the lazy Greek (Bratsis 2003).

The above represents a small sample of the cultural repertoire that heritage students might be bringing to our classrooms. They inject this educational space with a diasporic dimension we cannot afford to ignore.

As educators we now recognize that the identities and interests of our students matter in connection to the content of our courses and the pedagogies we practice. If we agree, several related questions confront us. What is the place of the students’ diasporic subjectivities in the modern Greek language classroom? What is our responsibility as we enter this space crisscrossed by all kinds of immigration histories and diasporic trajectories? How do we engage with these affiliations?

Educators may have their own reasons to object or hesitate to incorporate this diasporic dimension in the classroom. Such a position merits discussion, which I hope we will be taking up in the Q&A. In anticipation, I wish to share two interrelated thoughts to advocate for inclusion: one is based on classroom facts and their pedagogical implications; the other on the notion of diasporic classroom as a space of contested ideologies.

First, about the classroom facts: Even if the syllabus does not include diasporic topics, we know that students often choose diasporic narratives for their class projects. One example that comes to mind is narratives that celebrate individual and family resilience and hard work as the exclusive reasons for intergenerational mobility—see a student’s digital story in Amanatidou (2022).

This brings me to the question of ideology: Greek American studies have shown how the narrative of bootstrap mobility produces ethnic and racial hierarchies when they fail to take into consideration how social structure—racism, for example—has presented obstacles to socioeconomic mobility. Narratives of self-propelled success may offend students—historically conscious ones for example—who have alternative understandings of mobility. How do we respond to Greek American identity narratives that are ahistorical and harmful to other groups, while appearing innocent, and being ingrained in the identities of the students? These are not easy answers to tackle; the situation demands deep understanding of the issue and its implications. They are becoming even more complex in the current political environment.

The diasporic language classroom is ideological in yet another manner. A lack of interest in diasporic identities unwittingly participates in the ongoing cultural tension, even struggle between what scholars refer to as Helladic and Diasporic Hellenisms. The former approaches the diaspora primarily in relation to Greece as a metropolitan center, being seen in terms of sameness and continuity. The focus of the latter is the plurality of diasporic histories and subjectivities, being seen in terms of syncretism, change, and multiple cultural centers.

For those language educators who might wish to consider my proposition, the diasporic dimension of the classroom perhaps presents pressing challenges. One of the reasons is that modern Greek studies and Greek diaspora studies are often in limited (or non-existent) dialogue. Diaspora studies are not an integral component of modern Greek language and culture training.

To the best of my knowledge—and I hope I am mistaken—the corpus of work on methods and pedagogies in the teaching of diasporic material in the undergraduate language curriculum is limited. As a departure point, we may wish to turn to the work of Mihalis Damanakis (2007) whose writings on community schools (in the context of the Paideia Omogenon project) is relevant to the college language classroom. Of interest is his emphasis on what he calls «ενδοελληνική διαπολιτισμικότητα» (intraGreek interculturality), a theoretical, pedagogical, and political platform cultivating mutual understanding among students in Greece and their peers in the diaspora while challenging hierarchies of identity. This is particularly relevant to U.S. college Greek language programs, which have developed teaching modules for fostering interaction between their students and their peers in Greece.

Two Greek language anthologies featuring diasporic literary material and personal narratives might offer valuable instructional material toward this purpose (Damanakis 2004/2007; Dialektopoulos 2008).

Our Greek American education ought to include publications on undergraduate culture and literature courses. A pioneer in this field is Yiorgos Kalogeras (2004), who reflects on his implementation and teaching of a course on Greek American literature in 1986 at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He shares a detailed syllabus and the questions that shape his choice of teaching material. He does not neglect to comment on the demographics of his students, raising the question of audience. How do the personal experiences, cultural capital, and other variables of the students we aim to reach inflect the design of our syllabi? Significantly, he also raises the issue of department politics. How do we justify the teaching of the diaspora in the modern Greek classroom to Chairs, colleagues, and administrators?

Mellina Mallos (2020) illustrates the value of diasporic arts as a medium to mediate identity-making in a Greek Australian setting. Her pedagogy is based on the sharing of artistic expressions—personal and popular visual narratives such as photographs, collages, performances, and storytelling—to expose participants to a diverse range of perspectives. Drawing from Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, Mallos analyzes this space of exchange as generative, placing the Self in connection with others, producing dialogue, reflection, and conversation—a process that shapes and reshapes identity. A diasporic arts-centered pedagogy recognizes the value of the arts as inherently polyphonic—“many-voiced, incorporating many voices, styles, references, and assumptions not a speaker’s ‘own’” (25), thus making visible a community’s internal differentiations. Social interaction around a novel, a painting, or a photograph generates an exchange of perspectives through which participants can critically reflect on their positions, revise their views, embrace the perspective of others, or oppose them.

My own contribution is a piece in Greek entitled “Educational Politics and Identity in the Diaspora: Transculturalism, Multiplicity, Equality” (Anagnostou 2022), which invites educators to consider Greek identity as a political question—who is considered a Greek, who decides, and via which premises. A forthcoming publication discusses the rationale for proposing an educational policy that cultivates the notion of diasporic citizenship within what I call the “diaspora cultural/civic paradigm” (Anagnostou 2026).¹

For those of us who are interested in the topic of diasporic identity but are not familiar with conversations about its politics and poetics, there are still several routes for the gradual incorporation of diasporic material.

One is to introduce topics that have been analyzed by modern Greek studies scholars. I have in mind Mimika Kranaki’s Philellines (1992), Thanasis Valtinos’s To Synaxari tou Andrea Kordopati (1978), and certainly the corpus of Vassilis Alexakis. There are the songs of xenitia, documentaries on George Pelecanos, a crime fiction writer, in English with captions in Greek, translations of Jeffery Eugenides, Christos Tsiolkas, and Zeese Papanikolas’s book on labor leader Louis Tikas. Many texts are available in Greek, making them suitable candidates for modules on the practice of translation.

A second approach is to share material with students featuring bilingualism, translanguaging, and the poetics of linguistic play between Greek and English—for possible textual choices see Rakopoulos (2016) for poetry, and Anagnostou (2022) for song.

At this juncture, I ought to bring into the conversation our non-heritage students, a diverse and vital demographic that includes international students and those with multiple heritages. Instead of working with the duality of heritage/non-heritage students, I prefer to think of this population in terms of affinities and partial commonalities. Some children of immigrants may bring to the classroom an affinity for the experience of living with bilingual and bicultural realities. Diasporic material can offer resources to engage with issues beyond heritage, including the circumstances leading to socioeconomic mobility, the experience of migration, otherness and belonging, gender, self-representation, the ideological dimensions of identity narratives, ethnic and racial hierarchies, and the poetics of identity and translation.

Let me share this thought on a related topic: As educators, we constantly reflect on the material we opt to share with students. Our pedagogies involve not only the question of how we teach but what we teach and for what purpose. I wish to frame this question—we could call it the politics of pedagogy—in connection to a perspective that circulates among Greek American college students. Next-generation college students tend to resist narratives that impose an identity on them. Instead, they view themselves as agents in shaping their own identities. Not knowing the language does not make them less Greek, they argue, challenging the national narrative that equates language with identity while staking a claim to inclusion in the diasporic community. Or to share another student’s defining her generation: “it seems like my generation is going to redefine Hellenism for themselves and come up with a definition that is functional and useful for them, adapted for the current age and for the current evolution of the Greek American community” (Karambelas, 2021). It could be said that in challenging authoritarian narratives imposed on them from above, students exercise a form of “anti-discipline.” I am in no position to know how students would respond to educators assigning diasporic material in the classroom. But if we do assign it, we could consider how we could offer material relevant to a wide range of diasporic situations and cultural perspectives out of which students could assemble their own cultural and civic identities (see Anagnostou 2026).

I close with the observation that only a relatively small percentage of modern Greek programs systematically incorporate Greek American courses in their curricula. Adding diasporic dimensions in the language classroom might be the only opportunity for students to be exposed to diasporic material. Language classes could play then a catalytic role not only in generating student interest in diaspora as a research subject but also in contributing to Greek American knowledge in the case that educators—us—would display an interest in writing about that teaching experience and students’ voices on the subject.

November 08, 2025

Yiorgos Anagnostou teaches and conducts research at the Ohio State University.

Notes

1. See also the publications of the workshop proceedings, “Erγastirio: Writing Greek America – Placing Greek Diaspora Studies in North America Curricula.” Organized by Yiorgos Anagnostou and Simos Zenios, Spring 2022.
It includes an introduction by the organizers (Anagnostou and Zenios 2022), and essays by Elsa Amanatidou (2022) on language heritage learners, Eleftheria Arapoglou (2022) on literary and autobiographical subjects, and Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas (2022) on public history.

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Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2026. “The Diaspora Cultural/Civic Paradigm: Arts, Policy, the Next Generation.” In Advancing Greek Heritage Language Education in Canada. The Hellenic Relay: A Community Action Study [tentative title]. Edited by Themistoklis Aravossitas and Marianthi Oikonomakou. Springer Publishing.

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