On Measuring Identity

I have struggled to find a topic to focus on for my historiographical essay. I have wrestled with terms of identity, hybridity and struggled to pinpoint definitions this week. Identity, I have been told, is a hard to think to write about and research because it is such a difficult concept to nail down and quantify. It cannot be measured because everyone’s is unique and different. People identify as nationalities, genders/sexes, they see themselves as belonging to races and yet no two people’s combinations will be exactly the same. As Bernhard rightly pointed out to me, this makes it difficult to research. However, this seems to only fuel my fascination.

I read an article this week called Negotiating Hybridity: transnational reconstruction of migrant subjectivity in Koreatown, Los Angeles. It focuses on the physical space that Koreatown occupies as well as what it has come to represent both within its communities and those outside of it. The community within LA’s Koreatown is one of the largest outside Korea, and the authors argue that it should be seen as a hybrid space rather than one that is strictly homogenous as Koreans abroad. This article caught my eye because I grew up close to San Francisco, which hosts the ‘largest Chinese enclave outside Asia’. This grouping of Asian identities into almost ghettos (for lack of a better word, meant in terms of a minority group) is echoed in many other cities and countless other minorities in all parts of the world. The article gave great insight to why ethnic identities intensify when people migrate elsewhere. As they are seen as different, they forced to cling to what these are. Ethnic identity is not a natural phenomenon. It is a social identity, that is created deep within the psyche of self and other. To identify yourself is to see yourself in comparison to other people. My parents have recently moved to Mannheim, where they see the same thing with Vietnamese and Persian communities. No one place is ethnically/culturally homogenous anymore, which is something inherently positive. We all love greater food options, exposure to other cultures.

I really enjoyed reading Lee and Park’s personal take on transnationalism. Both Korean, this article was written while Lee was a visiting scholar in Ohio. Their interest emphasized that transnationalism is bounded to local places, and the opportunities and constraints of the people that occupy them. They quote Bhabha in that ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity’, and from this that Koreatown is not aptly named. Chinatown in San Francisco falls victim to this as well. It is not internally homogenous, but rather is home to multiple Asian and minority identities, and does not even encompass the same ones that it did half a century ago. They call this an ‘imagined geography’, which harks back to sub-honours IR and history constantly throwing Anderson’s Imagined Communities on the reading lists. Identity here is forced upon a physical geography and space, but the identity is constantly adapting, as are the parameters of ‘Korean-ness’.

Maybe it’s because I struggle with my own identity, proving Bernhard’s point that it is hard to define. Perhaps identity cannot be quantified, but that does not mean there isn’t  scholarship attempting to draw some links between the spaces, our backgrounds and the way in which we interact.