Filling the “Hollow” of Chineseness: Feeling Ethnic Identity Through Practice

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 8) Identities: Race, Class, and (Other) Inequalities

Abstract

In the wake of intensifying anti-Asian racism following the onset of Covid-19, Asian and Chinese American identities rose to greater salience in public discourse. In this context, some Chinese Americans expressed greater commitment to and pride in Chinese identity. This article explores how ethnoracial identities are made to feel essential by analyzing the personal projects people engage in to close a perceived gap between their own experiences and the identity categories to which they are meant to belong. Rather than relying on institutional or boundary-drawing explanations of ethnic persistence, I focus on the subjectivity of racialized subjects themselves, using the concept of “ethnic sincerity” to examine the link between feelings and identity alignment. Drawing on 78 interviews with Chinese Americans living in the US and abroad and 16 months of ethnographic observation at cultural events and “roots” trips, I outline three types of practices through which people achieve a deeply held sense of the ethnic self: 1) Incorporation of “Chinese” practices into embodied selves, 2) Affiliation with co-ethnic individuals and groups, and 3) Imaginal relationships to ancestors and places. By focusing on the embodied, relational, and imaginative practices through which Chinese identities are made tangible within ethnic boundaries, this article centers the enactments of racialized people, asking how ethnoracial identities can be made to feel real to the people who hold them. A focus on emotion and imagination offers an alternative to material and boundary-making analyses of race-making. In turn, alignment efforts often strengthened co-ethnic networks and institutions, and raised the salience of ethnic identities across contexts, leading to a more “consequential” experience of ethnic identity.

Author

• Charlotte Xue Lian Wang, Columbia University