From a Liminal Place by Lee Sang H

Author:Lee, Sang H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

Chapter 6

ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN A POSTMODERN AND POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT

Postmodernism has stressed the thoroughly historical nature of human existence, and has made it impossible to think about human selves and their individual identities as things that are permanent and fixed. The identity or “who one is,” therefore, is now spoken of as a dynamic reality that is constructed and reconstructed again and again. Stuart Hall points out that cultural identity is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’ … Cultural identities come from somewhere, and have histories. Like everything else which is historical, identities undergo constant transformation.”1

While agreeing with the postmodernists in their rejection of the classical substance theory of the self and the modern foundationalist construal of self as transcendent mind, philosopher Paul Schrag believes that the jettisoning of the self understood in these senses does not entail the jettisoning of every sense of self. Schrag argues that in the aftermath of the postmodernist deconstruction of traditional metaphysics and epistemology, “a new self emerges, like the phoenix arising from its ashes—a praxis-oriented self,” defined by the self’s discourse, its actions, its being with others in the community. Schrag elaborates further on the unfixed character of identity by pointing out that one does not construct identity by patching together abstract ideas of cultural values. Identity, according to Schrag, is more like a “happening” that emerges as one speaks, makes decisions, carries out actions in relation to the others. Schrag explains, “it is only when one moves to the level of the discursive event, in which there is an effort to communicate something to someone, that the question ‘Who is speaking?’ takes on relevance and indeed becomes uncircumventable.”2

So, the sense of identity emerges in and through actual discourse and action as the who of the discourse and the who of the action. What, then, constitutes the self’s continuity and coherence? It is the narrative form, answers Schrag, that “comprises the continuing context, the expanding horizon of a retentional background and a protentional foreground, in which and against which our figures of discourse are called into being, play themselves out and conspire in the making of sense.” What is true for human discourse applies also to human action. According to Schrag, “narrative is not simply the telling of a story by the who of discourse, providing a binding textuality of the past and future inscriptions; it is also the emplotment of a personal history through individual and institutional action.”3 Human actions are intelligible only when they are seen through the context of the narrative of a personal history. I will return below to the issue of narrative and identity.

While agreeing with postmodernism on the historical and thus continuously constructed nature of the identity of the human self, post-colonial studies have focused on the culturally hybrid identity of previously or presently colonized peoples. If one works with the assumption that there are “pure cultures,” hybrid or racially mixed persons can be considered as strange and inferior to them.

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