Yiorgos Anagnostou
The Greek/American Inheritance
As the editor of Ergon, it is my honor to inaugurate the “Voices of the Other Greek America” initiative.
I write this piece from two interrelated positions. That of a Greek American immigrant who identifies with a host of U.S. ideals, such as inclusivity, and with American and Greek notions of the citizen engaging with issues confronting the polis. And that of a professor at a top-tier public university who, over the span of 25 years, has taught Greek American history and culture to hundreds of students from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. My pedagogical approach involves presenting Greek America as a cultural field traversed with diverse experiences, expressions, and perspectives. This serves as the basis for generating dialogue and assessing conflicting interpretations, leading to new insights.
Students express interest and ask questions about a wide range of issues. This covers interracial relations, including love and marriage—their reception from the community and the experience of the biracial children. Cross-cultural mixing among Greeks, Americans, and other cultures. The experience of the working class, in the past and in the present, particularly in the mining towns and urban tenements in the early twentieth century. Women and feminism. Non-normative identities and sexualities. The effects of biculturalism on the psychology of the next generation. Issues of social justice and ethnic activism. Cultural change. Artistic renditions—in songs, literature, poetry, various forms of visual arts—of the Greek American experience.
I can engage with the students’ interests thanks to the work of a constellation of authors, actresses, poets, scholars, musicians, playwrights, and filmmakers. It includes the output of Helen Z. Papanikolas, Dan Georgakas, Olympia Dukakis, Theano Papazoglou Margaris, George Economou, Harry Mark Petrakis, Jeffrey Eugenides, George Pelecanos, Annie Liontas, Zeese Papanikolas, and Elia Kazan, among others. These makers of cultural material represent different generations yet share a common purpose. Linked together, their work textures Greek America as a terrain of human and cultural complexity, a shared achievement that renders their collective corpus an invaluable cultural heritage. I call this heritage the Greek/American inheritance.
I value this inheritance for several reasons. For its commitment to historical remembering. For acknowledging the toil of immigrants, their array of virtues, and the gifts that have been bequeathed to the community, country, and the next generation. But also, for not allowing this admiration to lose sight of issues still taboo in the community—immigrants savagely exploiting immigrants, illegalities, the toxic effects of patriarchy on immigrant women, daughters, and sons, ethnocentric and parochial points of view.
I acknowledge its significance in recognizing Greek America as a heterogeneous field marked with clashing interests. For juxtaposing working-class struggles for social justice with middle-class resistance to them. Or modernizers confronting traditionalists. For giving voice to non-normative subjectivities and tracing the exile of critical intellectuals from the “community.” Ultimately, as many have noted, from avoiding the trap of sugarcoating the “ethnic experience.”
This heritage pays its due to the country, appreciating the opportunities it accorded to Greek immigrants and their families. At the same time, it practices the American ideal of engaged citizenship. It critiques U.S. institutions such as mining corporations, Jim Crow racism, post-Civil Rights racialized hierarchies, and political oppression for exploitation, exclusions, and exiling dissent. The heritage of remembering pays homage to those who were killed in industrial incidents that could have been avoided, murdered for opposing oppression, destroyed because of racism, maligned and ostracized for their beliefs. It extends a necessary tribute to those immigrants whose lives and dreams were cut short violently.
Historical memory, inclusion, critique. They represent civic and cultural values connected with American intellectual and political traditions as well as Greek American self-identifications. They stand for core ideals associated with democracy and the necessary component of active citizenship—learning (paideia). They form a Greek American heritage that motivates many.
This heritage enacts a responsibility to Greek America’s past and present. It acknowledges its polyphony, explores it, seeks to understand it, and disseminates it. Since the late 1990s, it has served as my steady compass and motivation to keep contributing to its civic/cultural mission.
But this heritage is dismissed, ironically, by those who claim democracy and paideia as foundational elements of being Greek and American. I refer to a host of narratives that consistently idealize the group’s past and homogenize its present. They construe Greek America as a model American ethnicity around normative values—the family, church, tradition, socioeconomic success, and inherent moral values. Supported by a network of powerful institutions, this rendering of ethnicity-as-tradition is disseminated widely, achieving great public visibility.
This cultural operation performs a grave injustice. Sanitizing history and identity commits an offense, in fact an insult, to the Greek American values—democracy and paideia—which, ironically, as I mentioned, official networks of power purport to promote. Seeking to undermine the Greek/American inheritance, they systematically exclude it from those sectors of the diasporic public sphere that their power controls.
The Greek/American inheritance is widely appreciated and honored in alternative spaces—prestigious American and some Greek American cultural institutions. Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2004), and Harry Mark Petrakis (1923-2021) received numerous awards, including the Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame (2014). The Panhellenic Scholarship Foundation honored George Pelecanos, a crime fiction writer and acclaimed TV/film writer and producer, with its Paradigm Award (2021). But the ideas and insights of these writers are not incorporated in official narratives about the meaning of contemporary Greek American identity.
The initiative “Voices of the Other Greek America” is envisioned as a step toward foregrounding the Greek/American inheritance. It is intended as a contribution to individuals and social networks working toward an intellectually rigorous Greek American public sphere. How could this scattered terrain turn itself into a civic collective? How could it animate a common project without sacrificing its internal diversity?
The collection of essays in this initiative will certainly be pointing to a multiplicity of actions. My own take stems from the indifference that powerful institutions have been consistently shown toward listening to, let alone supporting, independent voices promoting historically responsible Greek American learning. One route of cultural activism will be to keep assisting those institutional sites—the university, archives, journals, diasporic spaces of literary and artistic production—which cultivate the Greek/American inheritance. Invest, in other words, toward its empowerment.
December 19, 2025
Yiorgos Anagnostou teaches and conducts research at the Ohio State University. His most recent publication is entitled, “European Americans: Making Ethnicity in Multiculturalism, Moving Toward Post-Ethnicity.” In The Elgar Companion to Arts and Global Multiculturalism (2025).