Browsing by Subject "Identity"

Black girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.

I study three contemporary Chilean works of visual culture that appropriate and re-assemble visual material, discourse, and atmosphere from the bureaucracy of the military state. I examine Diamela Eltit’s textual performance of legal discourse in Puño y letra (2005); Guillermo Núñez’s testimonial art Libertad Condicional (1979-1982) based on the documents pertaining to his imprisonment, parole and forced exile; and Pablo Larraín’s fictional film Post Mortem (2010) inspired by Salvador Allende’s autopsy report. I argue that they employ a framework that exposes both the functional and aesthetic modes of bureaucracy complicit in state terror that operate within the spectacular and the mundane. Furthermore, I trace bureaucracy’s origins from the founding of the nation to its current practices that enabled the societal conditions for dictatorship and continue to uphold dictatorial legacies into the present.

In my analysis, I engage theories from performance, legal and media studies to interpret how Eltit critiques the press coverage of human rights trials, Núñez informs institutionalized preservation of memory, and Larraín demonstrates the power of fiction in our documentary reconstruction of the past. I conclude by arguing that this examination of bureaucracy is imperative because state bureaucracy anchors vestiges of the dictatorship that persist into the present such as the dictatorship-era constitution and the newly revived preventative control of identity documentation law.

ABSTRACT

From Silent Exodus to the Fellowship Hall: The Ecclesial and Ethnic Identities of Second-Generation Korean Americans in Oregon

by

Daniel Jaewook Lee

Date:_____________________

Approved:

_________________________

Dr. Tito Madrazo, 1st Reader

_________________________

Dr. Sangwoo Kim, 2nd Reader

_________________________

Rev. Dr. Will Willimon, D. Min. Director

An abstract of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry in the Divinity School of Duke University

2021

ABSTRACT

From Silent Exodus to the Fellowship Hall: The Ecclesial and Ethnic Identities of Second-Generation Korean Americans in Oregon

by

Daniel Jaewook Lee

Date:_____________________

Approved:

_________________________

Dr. Tito Madrazo, 1st Reader

_________________________

Dr. Sangwoo Kim, 2nd Reader

_________________________

Rev. Dr. Will Willimon, D. Min. Director

An abstract of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry in the Divinity School of Duke University

2021

In his important work, The Beginnings of Jewishness, Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued that what it meant to be a Jew underwent considerable revision during the second century B.C.E. While previously a Jew was defined in terms of ethnicity (by which Cohen means biological descent), in the wake of Judaism's sustained encounter with Hellenism, the term Jew came to be defined as an ethno-religion--that is, one could choose to become a Jew. Nonetheless, the recent work of scholars, such as Christine E. Hayes, has demonstrated that there continued to exist in early Judaism a strain of thinking that, in theory at least, excluded the possibility that Gentiles could become Jews. This genealogical exclusion, found in works such as Jubilees, was highly indebted to the "holy seed" theology evidenced in Ezra-Nehemiah, a theology which defined Jewishness in genealogical terms.

This dissertation will attempt to contribute to a greater understanding of differing conceptions of circumcision in early Judaism, one that more accurately describes the nature of Jewish thought with regard to Jewishness, circumcision, and conversion. In terms of methodology, my dissertation will combine historical criticism with a literary approach to the texts under consideration. The dissertation will focus on texts from the Hebrew Bible as well as Jewish texts from the Second Temple period as these writings provide windows into the various forms of Judaism from which the early Christian movement arose.

Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, I will argue that there is no evidence that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. In fact, circumcision, particularly the infant circumcision instantiated within Israelite and early Jewish society excludes from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period, many Jews did begin to conceive of Jewishness in terms which enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Nonetheless, some Jews found this definition of Jewishness problematic, and defended the borders of Jewishness by reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. Consequently, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect genealogy. Our sources record such exclusion with regard to the Herodians, Idumeans who had converted to Judaism.

Additionally, a more thorough examination of how circumcision and conversion were perceived by Jews in the Second Temple period will be instrumental in better understanding early Christianity. It is the argument of this dissertation that further attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has broader implications for understanding the variegated nature of early Christian mission to the Gentiles in the first century C.E.

In this dissertation I explore the "homing desire" (Brah 1996:193) of American diasporas. I argue and show how identities are constructed as primordial. Specifically, I am interested in how homeland tourism, group tour experiences to ancestral homelands can be used as a "charter for new social projects" (Appadurai 1996:6) based around ancestral lands of origin and the qualities we associate with home. Therefore, this dissertation examines what happens when imagined communities (Anderson 1993) become briefly tangible.

I present analysis of participant observation and interview data from three different American populations to examine the very real desire to belong to a meaningful and worthwhile group. I map how secular college-aged American Jews, middle-class African Americans and white families with adopted Chinese daughters shape and define the imagined community through the brief face-to-face experience of the group homeland tour.

This dissertation takes the reader on tour, and analyzes the sites/sights of homeland travel, interactions between tourists, and interactions between tourists and homeland natives arguing that these experiences are consumed and interpreted to then define the individual and community's place in the social world and in the process influence domestic experiences of otherness.

Individuals engage with larger systems of organization that incorporate and implicate both the nation they reside within and the place they have chosen to visit, representing a distinctly Western and American path to imagined communities. While tourists look internationally to discover heritage and roots, I demonstrate how many expect and anticipate domestic changes and domestic acceptance of difference. In addition, tourism also facilitates global thinking, where homeland discoveries become examples of another sort of grounding in community, belonging to the cosmopolitan international global imagined.

In all these examples of empowerment and the assumed benefits of homeland explorations, we see the American, the transnational, and the global intersecting. This dissertation teases apart the multiple forms of movement occurring simultaneously that represent our contemporary moment. Therefore, I argue that this desire for rootedness and comfort that comes with knowing one's homeland reveals more about our contemporary moment and our individualistic approach to community consciousness than essential aspects of our identity and community. Homeland tours therefore provide Americans with experiences of international travel and a sense of global enlightenment, based not on heritage, but an understanding of global connectivity and power relations.

Through a comparative examination of three different engagements with homeland tourism, I examine how individuals not only tell a story to themselves about themselves, but also speak to the larger world. This dissertation therefore is a journey itself, a journey to belonging and discovery of community.

The focus on how one is behaving, feeling, and thinking, provides a powerful source of self-knowledge. How is this self-knowledge utilized in the dynamic reconstruction of autobiographical memories? How, in turn, might autobiographical memories support identity and the self-system? I address these questions through a critical review of the literature on autobiographical memory and the self-system, with a special focus on the self-concept, self-knowledge, and identity. I then outline the methods and results of a prospective longitudinal study examining the effects of an identity change on memory for events related to that identity. Participant-rated memory characteristics, computer-generated ratings of narrative content and structure, and neutral-observer ratings of coherence were examined for changes over time related to an identity-change, as well as for their ability to predict an identity-change. The conclusions from this study are threefold: (1) when the rated centrality of an event decreases, the reported instances of retrieval, as well as the phenomenology associated with retrieval and the number of words used to describe the memory, also decrease; (2) memory accuracy (here, estimating past behaviors) was not influenced by an identity change; and (3) remembering is not unidirectional – characteristics of identity-relevant memories and the life story predict and may help support persistence with an identity (here, an academic trajectory).

This dissertation documents African-American girls' musical practices at a Boys and Girls Club in Durham, NC. Hip-hop is the cornerstone of social exchanges at John Avery, and is integrated into virtually all club activities. Detractors point to the misogyny, sexual exploitation and violence predominant in hip-hop's most popular incarnations, suggesting that the music is a corrupting influence on America's youth. Girls are familiar with these arguments, and they appreciate that hip-hop is a contested and sometimes illicit terrain. Yet they also recognize that knowledge about and participation in hip-hop-related activities is crucial to their interactions at the club, at school, and at home. As girls hone their listening skills, they reconcile the contradictions between behavior glorified by hip-hop and the model presented to them by their mentors. This project examines how African-American girls ages 5-13 use their listening practices to claim a space within hip-hop's landscape while still operating within the unambiguous moral framework they have learned from their parents, mentors and peers. Through ethnography and close analysis of vocal utterances, dance moves and social interaction, I consider how individual interactions with mass-mediated music teach girls a black musical aesthetic that allows them to relate to their peers and mentors, and how these interactions highlight the creativity with which they begin to negotiate sexual and racial politics on the margins of society.

This dissertation explores the nature of early Christian identity in relation to non-Christian Jewish alterity as these are portrayed in the Gospel of Luke. Recent study of the relationships among Jews and Christians in the first centuries of the Common Era has been marked by an increasing awareness of the substantial overlap that existed between what would emerge only later as clearly delineated “Jewish” and “Christian” identities. The study of the so-called “parting of the ways” between Jews and Christians has thus opened up new avenues for inquiry into questions that were once thought, at least by New Testament scholars, to be settled by paradigms that are now roundly judged to be unsatisfactory. However, these developments in the study of early Jewish/Christian relations have not yet prompted an adequate reinvestigation of the place of the Lukan writings within the conflicts and convergences of early Jewish and early Christian life. This dissertation therefore examines Luke’s Gospel as both a theological text and an historical artifact in the light of the question of how early Christian identity was conceived in relation to early Christian conceptualizations of Jewish identity. It seeks to explain the theology of Israel exhibited in the Lukan narrative and to situate this theological narrative within its historical setting in a manner that sheds light on both the author’s mode of explicating religious identity and alterity and the otherwise shadowy history of earliest Jewish/Christian relations.

Methodologically, this study utilizes standard tools of biblical criticism, including historical and literary approaches. Source-critical and redaction-critical analyses are combined with historical-critical reflection on early Christianity, early Jewish/Christian relations, and the gospel tradition in order to evaluate the socio-rhetorical nature of Luke’s presentation of Christian and non-Christian Jewish identities. Through this exegetical analysis, I argue that the orientation toward non-Christian Jewish others in Gospel of Luke (along with the Acts of the Apostles, which is treated in connection with Luke’s gospel throughout) is not adequately described by standard theories of identity construction in early Christianity, in which Christian identity is said to have taken shape historically as the church distanced itself socially from non-Christian Jews and formulated its self-understanding in contradistinction to its constructed image of a denigrated non-Christian Jewish alterity. Against this model, I argue that Luke’s theological presentation of Christian and non-Christian Jewish identities exhibits a consistent parallelism in Luke’s call to the church and to those outside its community to repent and gather with Jesus in the face of coming judgment. I argue further that this rhetorical characteristic of Luke’s gospel is best accounted for by positing a social context in which the evangelist lived in close proximity to both the Christian church, which he called to greater faithfulness, and to non-Christian Jews, whom he called to repent and sought to persuade to accept his vision of the fulfillment of hopes of Israel in Jesus of Nazareth.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 many Southern Vietnamese were displaced and forced to relocate. Many of those refugees settled into an area located in Orange County, California and for the past fifty years have worked together to establish the community and space that is now recognized as Little Saigon. This thesis is a study of Little Saigon in particular, how Vietnamese immigrants have deterritorialized, or rejected the dominant notion of having to assimilate and adopt American culture to fulfill the American dream. Instead, community members have made purposeful interconnections to reterritorialize to construct a space meaningful to them where they, through their own minor strategies can productively and successfully live their own version of the Vietnamese American dream, thus allowing them to climb the ladder of upward mobility and attaining opportunities to physical mobility. I first trace the ways in which the first and generation physically alter the space in Orange County to a space that is accessible and makes sense to them by analyzing historical and present maps. Next, I examine the ways Vietnamese culture is produced and maintained in the United States for this community by examining the content and distribution of entertainment shows such as Paris By Night. Lastly I trace the impact of Vietnamese contribution to the nail salon industry and how the expansion of manicuring services has allowed for Vietnamese women to successfully become independent entrepreneurs and breadwinners in their family.

A long tradition of social psychological research suggests that perceptions of similarity and common ground can promote more harmonious relations among otherwise diverse social groups. Yet perceived similarity with and empathy for members of an outgroup can also intensify intergroup bias by threatening the positive distinctiveness of one's group. In the present research, cognitive dissonance theory is used as a framework for understanding how people experience and react to similarity with members of a rival outgroup and for clarifying the conditions under which outgroup similarity reduces or intensifies intergroup prejudice. Four studies tested the hypothesis that outgroup similarity elicits subjective feelings of cognitive dissonance, including psychological discomfort and negative self-evaluation. Study 1 was a pilot test in which similarity to an outgroup member was associated with negative self-evaluation but not psychological discomfort. Study 2 strengthened the interpretation of the turncoat effect as cognitive dissonance by demonstrating that the effect varies as a function of a classic dissonance moderator--perceived choice. Participants induced to experience outgroup similarity reported psychological discomfort and negative self-evaluation, but only when they believed their feelings of similarity resulted from a high degree of personal choice. Study 3 identified strength of ingroup identification as another key moderator of the effect: Only participants who were highly identified with their ingroup reported feelings of dissonance after an induction of outgroup similarity. Finally, Study 4 investigated the implications of three dissonance reduction strategies for intergroup prejudice.

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.

The following work explores identity from overlapping vantage points; biblical/theological, historical and practical to establish a robust understanding of identity in our present time. This thesis explores the ontological elements of God and the meaning of “image bearer” through Scripture in Genesis 1-2; Psalm 8; an overview of Wisdom Literature in Job and Ecclesiastes; and the New Testament in Ephesians and Colossians. From a historical view, this thesis focuses on the work of St. Augustine and how humanity was “naturally created” in the imago Dei. Even those that are not Christ followers share in the imago Dei, as hidden as it may be, to be discovered and set free. Through this process, we see holiness (in contradistinction to morality) as foundational to our existence and reflective of God. Holiness is expressed through love in its proper order. For Augustine, our love of God conditions our love for all other things. This establishes an objective starting point, fundamental to all Christians, a proper understanding and embodiment of the Great Commandment. Finally, by practically applying a fresh understanding of one’s identity, humanity has an opportunity to thrive by acknowledging the positive implications of the embracing and embodiment of the imago Dei.The primary methodology of this thesis is through interpreting Scripture in light of the question, “what does it mean to be created in the imago Dei?” Using the work of the early Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine give interpretive grounding to passages in both Old and New Testaments. Reading both primary and secondary sources on the imago Dei and its impact upon humankind and specifically the Church. Lastly, incorporating and integrating the work of modern psychology in understanding the modern person in light of the creative work of God in the beginning to our current day.