Fluid Identities: International Student Network and “In-betweenness”

Camouflage

Amelia López López

Indiana University Bloomington

It was my first time back, after two and a half years away from my home in Bogotá, Colombia. Panic invaded my body, and paralysis came. I couldn’t leave the house by myself; all the places I knew before were now ghosts residing in my memory. The city changed, and I felt that I did not belong anymore. I had lost my home. Somehow, I became too foreign…too afraid. I spent much time navigating a transnational space between “home” and what became my “new home” in the US, a space that constantly transforms and blurs the lines of the sense of familiarity. After long and painful hours of traveling in-between, I have come to learn how to move, camouflage, and survive. I found hope in Gloria Anzaldúa’s proposition of a new mestiza consciousness, but, in doing so wouldn’t I betray “my people”? How could I rely on epistemological propositions coming from the US? Particularly after knowing the power imbalances and its imperialist impulses? But soon I learned the language to describe my new role, I was transforming into a nepantlera, a person that moves through different worlds, refusing to align with one single worldview…So then, I feel this expectation of being fluent and not speaking a broken tongue while moving sharply between spaces that feel foreign to me.

Fluidity

Mark Hsiang-Yu Feng

University of California, Davis

Embracing in-betweenness empowers my fieldwork positionality. It frees me from defining myself solely based on place and allows me to look optimistically at the advantages and disadvantages of gaining global mobility. My first year of studying in a US ethnomusicology program resembled conducting “fieldwork” in an unfamiliar place, especially when I communicated in a secondary language, experienced culture shock, and got confused with social norms. However, my travels back and forth between the US and Taiwan kept me reflecting on my racial/ethnic/national identities. My interactions with musicians in the "fields" in the US and Taiwan allowed me to share how I understood the differences in popular music and cultures across the Pacific. These travels make my in-betweenness tangible and valuable and inform my understanding of this academic discipline, and they stimulate me to draw deeper connections between the issue of music and race in the US and Taiwan. Although I no longer know every slang and trend in Taiwan, I am now capable of viewing the culture of my home country from a different perspective. The fluidity of my positionality consistently reshapes how I understand the concept of the “field.”

Simultaneities

Suyash Kumar Neupane

Indiana University Bloomington

After spending four years in the US academic system, I am back in Nepal for fieldwork. When asked to contribute to this article, I had flashbacks of moments when the cultures I grew up in or am experientially knowledgeable about were “amerisplained” back to me. Here at home, sadly enough, our bureaucratic and academic elites seem to suffer from a “colonial hangover,” where they are skeptical of Nepali scholars, but at ease with white scholars. The struggle for me then, as a Nepali scholar trained in the US, is to deconstruct and tread carefully through the baggage of colonial history and the privilege accrued from partaking in the present-day hegemony of “euromericentric” academia. Day after day, simultaneously trying to fit in as well as break away from assumptions and social roles that are prescribed and ascribed amidst the hybridized social realities of our home countries and universities abroad seems like an enervating adventure (aside from exacerbating mental health issues and trauma). To put it curtly, as international students, our identities are chaotic actualities repressed or tokenized by structures of power at home and abroad, that seek to compartmentalize our belongingness and becomingness. While our identities may shift across space and time—often by our deliberate effort—we will always be subject to certain predispositions, both imagined and assumed. Our identities revel in parallel simultaneities, yet unnamed, rather than dichotomies: here, there, nowhere, in-between, on the edge, everywhere. But be it fieldwork, academic training, or professional practice, as long as the lenses through which we are seen remain static and unchanging with the times and contexts, ruminating on identities seems futile and painful for us.

Returnings

Shuo Yang

University of Pittsburgh

Last year, I decided to return to China after graduating from my Ph.D. program. To me, it is more meaningful to pursue my future career at home, integrate my academic training in the US into ethnomusicology traditions in China, and collaborate with different academic traditions from outside the hegemonic centers of knowledge production. When I expressed my thoughts to a prestigious senior scholar in China, however, there was a response with concern and mistrust toward international students who received academic training in the US or Western Europe and then returned to work in China. Instead of encouragement and more conversation, the response was that international students often fail to adapt to the academic environment in China because they are either too proud or unwilling to put their attention on the tradition and methodology of ethnomusicology in China, or too “lazy” to publish as fast as other Chinese scholars. The challenges that international students confront are multilayered and can be highly contextual. The complexity of our identities and the labels we are given often result in further marginalization and alienation in European/US academia or at home.

Sense of Belongings

Chun Chia Tai

University of California, Riverside

“We are facing the same situation, so that’s why you are here,” my teacher and interlocutor, Fran Lujan, the director and curator at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum, said to me while I was conducting fieldwork. For her, navigating the identity of CHamoru, the Indigenous people of the Pacific Island of Guam, and the identity of Pacific Islander is a part of her everyday life in California; for me, adopting a new identity as “Asian” with my Taiwanese identity in the US is a part of my life too. In my research about Pacific Islanders’ migration to the US, learning how my teacher identified herself in a new place helped me re-settle my sense of belongings in-between the US, Taiwan, and Asia. Being perceived as “Asian” in the US, my sense of belongings no longer merely connects with the country I am from; rather, I also learned that I belong to Asia. Yet, I find it difficult to locate my mind and body in this single-facet concept of Asia, especially with my anger toward the political status of my country. Struggling to answer the question of “who am I,” my research continues to be a lesson about diaspora and personal migration for me because while my interlocutors are mentors and teachers who share their experiences of navigating in shifting identities and sense of belongings in diaspora, they are guiding me to place my intersected, multi-layered, and fluid identities across the Pacific.

Adaptability

Vivianne Asturizaga

Florida State University

When the pandemic hit, I was in the US. The privilege was noticeable; free PCRs or the prompt access to vaccines, high-speed internet, and the already learned skills of working in hybrid education; things not available at the time in my home country and fieldwork site, Bolivia. I felt it was an exciting yet challengingtimetodoethnography.Therewere multipleand diverse online events and meetings available at a finger click. There was also panic at different levels, from curfews and an extensive list of deaths around close friends andfamilytonewventureformationsthatwerequestioningnewformatsofmusic makinginahardtimeforartists. When I could travel, I prepared for culture shock and the switch I needed to make to navigate my other home. However, although my preparation helpedmetobeinbetweenworlds,Iwasnotreadyforthesubstantialchange that happened, especially when seeing the sudden adaptation by residents in Bolivia to digitaltechnologythat,inturn,allowedforalargeamountofonlinedatabutless in-person contact. I also needed extra time to reflect regularly on my positionality as a Bolivian who studied in the Global North, how I fit in this scene, and how Bolivians perceived me during the hardest times of the pandemic, especially because of their trauma. These reflections allowed for a different kind of data collection and analysis. In this way, my fieldwork experience at the time of the pandemic opened a new possibility for hybrid research and in-betweenness, a place in which I now also find a home.