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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Ionna Laliotou. Transatlantic Subjects: Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism Between Greece and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 257. $21.00.
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| The central theme of this work is both old and new in immigration historiography: that is, the psychological conditioning of the migrant to America. Ionna Laliotou refers to it as "immigrant subjectivity." Essentially it is the mental conditioning of the traveler as he/she traverses the Atlantic, especially one's consciousness of the relationship between the old country and the new. Immigration historians since Oscar Handlin (The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People [1952]) have often speculated on the personal transition between the places of departure and arrival, but never with the full and extended attention and the heavily theoretical analysis that Laliotou devotes to the subject. A few scholars, like David Gerber, have specifically explored that mental conditioning of the individual migrant. Laliotou's book is innovative and largely successful but not without flaws. |
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The author approaches her topic by drawing on a rich array of Greek sources and as well as the more familiar ones in English. She begins with a lengthy discussion of Greece's ambivalent policy toward emigration, which largely condemned the hemorrhaging of the population but also encouraged the mass exodus as a way to bring Hellenism to new lands. Utilizing psychological theory, including the ideas of Sigmund Freud, she concludes that the migrant's experience was rather complex, not homogeneous but contradictory. |
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