"My Kids Are Still Called Dagoes": Andonis Piperoglou on the historical responses to racial slurs

Image courtesy of the Greek Community of Melbourne.
Thursday 8 September 2022

2021 ECR Grant recipient, Dr Andonis Piperoglou, recently presented a hybrid event for the Greek Community of Melbourne's History and Culture Seminar Series. We were very pleased to provide support to his research, some of the findings of which are presented in his lecture, entitled 'My Kids Are Still Called Dagoes: Historical responses to an irksome racial slur'. 

Terms like 'dago' or 'wog' have been used in Australia and other Western nations to describe migrants from the Mediterranean region for many years. Yet little historic attention has been paid to these terms and the ways they impacted and continue to impact migrants. Where contemporary discussion of racial slurs does occur, it often lacks historic context. 

In this lecture, Andonis seeks to clarify the role racist name-calling plays in shaping how migrants understand cultural difference, and how they understood each other. 

Click the link below to watch the full video (and skip ahead to 9:30 for the start of the lecture). 

About the speaker

Andonis was a 2021 recipient of the Freilich Project's ECR Small Grants scheme for his project, "From ‘Dagoes’ to ‘Wogs’: a transnational history of racial slurs". He researches migration history and is the Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on the history of Greek settlement in Australia. This lecture stems from a chapter published in Redirecting Ethnic Singulairy: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation, edited by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos D. Kalogeras, and Theodora Patrona, winner of the 2022 Modern Greek Studies Association Vasiliki Karagiannaki Best Edited Book Prize in Modern Greek Studies.

Media

HYBRID: "My kids are still called dagoes": historical responses to an irksome racial slur

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