German and Japanese transnational migrants in America: Biculturalism in comparative perspective

Abstract

To study biculturalism in the United States is to look into how racial and ethnic boundaries are defined, maintained, and contested in this society. In everyday life in the United States, it is a pervasive tendency to classify individuals into existing cultural groupings according to their “lineage,” and to assume little or no variation within the categories. In the meantime, much academic research repeatedly points to racial and ethnic groups being socially constructed, and that therefore, racial and ethnic identities are contextual and multi-layered, and members within a group are far from monolithic. This chapter adds to this debate against the deceptively simplistic, yet prevailing, view that regards racial and ethnic groups as largely impermeable and static, by underlining the dynamism and multiplicity of cultural identities perceived by a group of transnational migrants.

Citation

Nishida, M. (2008), "German and Japanese transnational migrants in America: Biculturalism in comparative perspective", Dennis, R.M. (Ed.) Biculturalism, Self Identity and Societal Transformation (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 77-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0195-7449(08)15005-X