In K. Scott Wong's "Diasporas, Displacements, and the Construction of Transnational Identities, Wong asserts that the correlation between race, ethnicity, nationality, glass, and gender has become more complex as the rate of transnationalism rises due to the globalization of capital, labor and migrants. While this article provided a broad framework in introducing transnationlism by outlining the examples in the following chapters, like the Chinese in the West Indies and the Vietnamese Afro-Americans, one specific point that I found interesting was the idea of cultural identity being historically based, yet constantly undergoing change as well as the notion of the technoscape exponentially shrinking the boundaries of nation-states today. I thought that these two ideas completely support one another and led me to few questions to pose: in what other ways, besides technology, affects change in cultural identity? What technologies in the future will affect cultural identity? And perhaps what I am most interested in knowing, has technology strengthened or weakened one's ties to the homeland? Personally speaking, the internet has been able to connect me to both traditional and popular culture of my homeland in addition to my extended family, but the very thing that allowed my parents to migrate to the United States was the airplane; just in this example alone, I see a divide in how technology has affected my experience with diaspora and displacement. This article is definitely related to this week's theme of displacement: it shows displacement in various groups of Asian Americans and also highlights how transnationalism is manifested in specific examples.
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| The airport represents just one route that is created by transnational diasporas, as described by Bharati Mukherjee in the article. |
Sources:
K. Scott Wong. “Diasporas, Displacements, and the Construction of Transnational Identities.”
Displacements.
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