Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

To mend the walls of Babel : essays on identity and ethnicity

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  • In this thesis, I explore experiences with my identity, looking at the identity people have seen me as, who I've thought I was, and the identities my mother's and father's different family backgrounds suggest I should be. I have divided this discussion into three main areas: my complexion, the first time I became aware of racial differences while living on Stats Street in Las Vegas, and my stay at Fort Dix, New Jersey during Army Basic Training. I explore my complexion first because it has been the biggest factor in my own understanding of my identity. Because of my darker complexion. I've been mistaken as Mexican, Cuban, Filipino, and African-American, and judged (misjudged) accordingly. It has often branded me as a "trouble maker" and made me feel ugly and inferior to my white friends. In the thesis' middle section, I look specifically at my stay on Stats Street, in a lower income housing "project." During my stay there, all of my neighbors, except one, were African American. I felt a constant barrier between me and my neighbors because of skin color and the different ideologies and lifestyles I came in contact with there. Finally, I look at a period of my life when I was forced to live among a very diverse group of people. In the Army, I was seen as a kind of anomaly because I didn't fit into the naturally occurring groups that formed. Through my entire discussion, I attempt to present a metaphor for the ever-changing and ever-creating process of identity that I've seen myself go through and continue to go through: mending walls and tearing walls down. I present a notion of identity, and ethnicity, that is in flux for everyone, one that is constantly being constructed and deconstructed. I do not attempt to enter into the discussions on ethnicity in order to offer a way to approach ethnicity or multiculturalism, but I do offer my discussion here as a process of one Japanese-Hawaiian, Cherokee Indian man who is still searching for his identity yet has begun to understand, at least, his own process of identity.
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file details InoueAsaoB1996.pdf 2017-08-20 Pubblico Scaricare