When is a Door not a Door?

 When is a Door not a Door:
The Issue of Ethnicity and Cultural Identity

by Meredith Pasahow

    There is a very old and rather stale joke that goes like this: "When is a door not a door? When it's ajar." Haha, rimshot.

But this question can become somewhat existential if we replace "door" with something else. For example, what if we replaced it with "American"? When is an American not an American? When they travel? When they move out of the country? Or is it when they’re in their own native land, as Radhakrishnan suggests in his article, “Between Living and Telling: Ethnicity in the age of Transnationalism”.

Radhakrishnan believes that someone is not truly ethnic within their own country. When they’re in they’re own country, they’re a national. This is where they belong. However, if someone travels to another country, they become ethnic because they are not part of that nationality. As he describes it, “A subject could be Hungarian in Hungary and hence not ethnic and ergo fully national but would become ethnic Hungarian in, say, Poland”.

          Let’s work with this for a minute, because it is a complex subject. I’ll help us along by sharing a few anecdotes from my own travels. I am an American. Moreover, I’m considered a Texan (I don’t consider myself Texan but we’ll call me Texan for the sake of these stories). Never did I feel more shockingly American, more deeply Texan than the semester I spent studying in France.

          For one thing, everything that was familiar to me instantly became foreign the moment I moved in with my host family. I brought them pecans as a gift; a little taste of home. Apparently, pecans do not grow in France, because my host parents became instantly fascinated by them. “Look, look Arnaud!” my host mother Beatrice cried in delight, “They look like little brains, how funny!” We each ate one, and then they were put away, only to be brought out when guests were over. The guests were allowed to look at and admire these foreign nuts, but no one was allowed to eat them. They became a precious thing.

          I tapped into my different ethnicities a few times to prepare food for my host family. We had a taco night, in which my host parents tried in vain to eat tacos with a knife and fork. I wanted to make them corned beef and cabbage for Saint Patrick’s Day, but there was no translation for “corned beef”, it simply didn’t exist in France. I felt foreign, which made me cling tighter to my ethnicities. It made me feel more connected to my Irishness, my Texanocity.

          Last but not least, there was my accent. By the time I studied in France, I had been speaking French for twenty years, part of which was learned in Canada. As such, my accent wasn’t “American-French”. I was asked where I was from – most guessed England or Germany (apparently, I speak French with a German accent). No one believed me when I told them I was American. I had to clutch even tighter at my ethnicity, to defend it to these people who wanted to discredit it. Or worse yet, if I said I was from Dallas, they would proclaim, “Oh Dallas! Like the television show! Who shot JR, yes, I know Dallas very well”. But Dallas, and Texas are much more than a television show. I became protective of an ethnicity I didn’t even like being included in when I was in America.

          So, what does this all mean? Where does it lead us in our discussion of ethnicity and identity? Stuart Hall suggests, and my experiences seem to support, that cultural identity is a production. Both in the performative sense, and in the sense that it is always being produced. Always changing, being worked on and adjusted. I found this very true for myself when I was in France. In America, I don’t feel American. I don’t feel Texan, or Irish, or any of the other ethnicities that are native to me. But once I stepped outside the borders of my country, my cultural identity shifted. It became in production.

          Hall goes on to discuss the meaning of cultural identity. One aspect he explores is a collective oneness, a true self, as he says, beneath everything else. Something at the core of all those who share that identity. I found this in the questions that my French friends asked. “Why do Americans put their flag everywhere?” Well, I hadn’t thought about that. But it is something that is part of our cultural identity, something that did not shift into place for me until I saw it from the French point of view.

    All of this to say, I suppose, that I did not become American, I did not become Texan until I lived in France. And I did not fully understand why this was until I explored the ideas of ethnicity and cultural identity, and what this meant for me, personally.