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.

On Measuring Identity

One thought on “On Measuring Identity

  • February 24, 2020 at 12:55 pm
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    Hello!! I’ve also been interested the identities of migrants, albeit Chinese migrants to Cuba, and the way in which these identities have been deployed. So, naturally, I really liked your blog post. I especially liked this quote: ‘transnationalism is bounded to local places, and the opportunities and constraints of the people that occupy them’. I think this is a really interesting interpretation of what ‘transnationalism’ is/can be. Visualising the process as a bubble that shifts and expands, becoming muddy with other cultural influences yet eventually incorporating it into something distinctly theirs – this is really cool, and I think is a train of thought that is definitely worth exploring! We see this a lot in East Asian interactions with Western colonialism. The US gives Japan flour after World War II with the intention of forcing the Japanese to make bread, and the Japanese instead turn it into ramen. Ramen is now considered a distinctly Japanese art form. Hong Kong is exposed to the Portuguese egg tart, and they turn it into something that is distinctly ‘made in Hong Kong’. Although it was once a foreign import, it has now been incorporated into the local cuisine and is considered a cornerstone of Chinese baking. In both these places, the boundaries of what can be considered distinctly ‘Japanese’ and ‘Chinese’ have grown. The result of this process is a paradox – the process of incorporating foreign influences into the culture have increased the meanings of these national identities. In turn, this paradox raises lots of interesting questions. What does this mean for transnational history and our conception of borders? How should we analyse and make sense of these unique processes? Overall, I think this topic gives you lots of things to think about and is a really good starting point for your essay!

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