[MGSA-L] Revised Cfp/Edited volume on Greek American and Italian American Culture

[Theodora Patrona]

Dear All
Please find a revised Call for the Edited Volume *Transcultural Encounters:
ItalianAmericans and Greek Americans.  Following the latest revision, t*he
Editors are also interested in comparative papers.

*Transcultural Encounters: Italian Americans and Greek Americans*

Italian Americans and Greek Americans have lived in the same neighborhoods,
worked in the same workplaces, loved each other, married with each other,
and participated in labor strikes together. Did they play music together?
Did they find inspiration in each other’s cultural expressions? What do we
know about the field of their interactions? They have certainly been
classified under the same rubric as “white ethnics,” Michael Novak’s
infamous PIGS (Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs), an ideological
construction which was pivotal in the identity politics of the 1970s. But
how did Italian American and Greek American lives intersect in everyday
social life? How did they negotiate their mobility to the suburbs in
relation to each other? In what ways did Italian American and Greek
American histories and experiences diverge?

The transcultural encounters between Italian Americans and Greek Americans
have been marginalized in academic research, where the “single group
approach” privileges the study of ethnic singularity instead of
cross-cultural intersections. Literature, literary criticism, and labor
studies certainly acknowledge and explore Italian–Greek American
cross-fertilizations. But this transcultural field requires that we place
it at the center of analysis to bring scholarship closer to social
realities.

This volume brings into focus Italian American and Greek American
encounters from the perspective of anthropology, folklore, history,
language, literature, and cultural studies, including film,
ethnomusicology, and biography. Taking cues from concepts such as “contact
zones” and borderlands, we are interested in understanding the social
dynamic–processes involving negotiation, conflict, cooperation, solidarity,
love, cultural exchanges–that have marked these encounters. We are
interested in identifying differences, similarities, and intersections
across the historical experiences of these groups. We wish to map specific
encounters and find out what these encounters tell us about European
American transculturalism in the United States.

In addition to cross-cultural encounters, we are also interested in
contributions comparing Italian American and Greek American cultural
expressions, festivals and architecture for instance, as well as
institutions, language schools, university programs in language and
cultural studies, and others. We ask that in addition to comparing
particular expressions and institutions, contributors reflect on the
practices of comparison they have employed. How do the authors understand
comparison? What comparative approach was chosen for a specific case study
and why?

We are looking for papers which are theoretically informed and
ethnohistorically grounded. They must engage with key theoretical concepts
associated with transcultural encounters and comparison, and must be
written in a compelling and accessible prose. Length should not exceed
6,000 words, including bibliography.

*All submissions will undergo peer review. *

Topics could include the following:

• Workplace; working class solidarities and tensions

• Multiple identities

• Family, gender, sexuality

• Religion and Folklore (intersection of mythological themes for example)

• Resistance to or consent to whiteness

• Immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods

*• *The immigrant and ethnic past: memory, family biography, autobiography

• Cultural cross-fertilizations; music, theater, cinema

*Timeline *

Please send a well-developed, 350-500 word abstract, and a curriculum vitae
to Theodora Patrona (tpatrona at gmail.com) by *October 15, 2018*. The
abstract must outline the author’s theoretical framework and identify the
aims of the work. It must include relevant bibliography.

Formal invitation to contribute to the volume by *November 15, 2018*

Deadline for the submission of the book chapter, *May 1, 2019*

Projected date of publication *Fall 2019*

Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Theodora Patrona

Editors
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