How does the newly arrived immigrant respond to the news that an identity already awaits him? How does an African American hip-hop artist translate his struggles and triumphs across oceanic divides? What significance do American demographic shifts have in a global context? Hsu's essay examines what happens once individuals or identities migrate beyond the contexts that first produced them. He explores a variety of circuits: the satellite communities of Asian immigrant students who arrived on American university campuses in the late 1960s; enduring debates about a “post-city” identity, spurred by advances in cheap, efficient, world-shrinking communication technologies; and the new affinities and categories of self-identification made possible by a present-day culture that prizes interactivity and participation.

Issue Section:
Race in the Age of Obama, volume 1
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© 2011 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
2011
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