Linguistic Autoethnography paper rewrite #writing

Source 1: CHAPTER 5 Identity: How Does It Shape Our Sense of Self? Jean de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who moved to America in the eighteenth century (see “The Melting Pot”), wrote that an immigrant to the United States “becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great alma mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” As we saw in Chapter 4, the metaphor of a melting pot, in which people of various origins are blended together to become one unified compound, has remained a popular image of our society. Attempts to forge a truly homogeneous American society, however, have met with limited success — and consistent opposition. One challenge is that racial and ethnic identity are deeply felt and persistent, not only for recent immigrants but also for their children and grandchildren. In a society in which defining oneself is increasingly important, our cultural and geographic roots, even when they are generations old (note the continued success of ancestry.com), are becoming a significant source of selfunderstanding as well as personal pride. But they can also be a source of confusion and displacement and, especially in recent years, have led to a constant racial and ethnic tension. In this chapter, we will examine both the personal and the public sides of racial and ethnic identity, how identity shapes an individual’s sense of self as well as how it leads to the larger social and399 cultural issues that today commonly go by the term “identity politics.”

Source2: එඖ ඊකඑඍඎ: කඛඉඔ Gish Jen A New High School Course: Identity 101 [The Washington Post Magazine, October 29, 2017] The concept of identity brings many people together: If they can “identify” with one another, they will see themselves in many ways as the same. But when a society is composed of many different identities, then it’s very likely that identity will result in an emphasis on differences — people will start seeing a world divided by “them” and “us.” In “A New High School Course: Identity 101,” the prominent Chinese American author Gish Jen proposes that “in the interest of a more functional nation,” it would be a good idea for students to learn about “culture” in general. In this very brief essay, she poses a number of questions that she believes we need to ask ourselves in order to overcome our cultural differences and divides. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Gish Jen is an award-winning novelist and

short story writer. Her most recent nonfiction book is The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap (2017). Race, class, gender. These lenses on society have proved revelatory, and no one would ever deny their importance. And yet to this holy trinity, I would like to add a fourth lens: culture.401 Cultural difference has riven our culture. We are aware that there are cultural divides. We are aware that we have trouble talking across these divides. We are aware that there seems to be no convincing some people of their essential wrongness and our essential rightness. We are aware that some part of the problem is unrelated to our objective interests — that some part of the problem is a matter of how we just think things should be. We are aware that some of us do not see the same things at all. We are aware that we can bug others as much as they bug us. And yet the nature of culture itself — of what drives these differences, of what drives our ideals and focus and irritation — is poorly understood. Do we have selves independent of culture? In the interest of a more functional nation, then, I propose a new high school requirement. Every student should be required to take, not a course in foreign culture — not a course in Italian food, or Japanese gardens, or Central American weaving — but a course on the nature of culture: on meta-culture. We could call it Identity 101. What part of identity is culture? Where does our culture come from? How has it helped us? Do we have selves independent of culture? Does anyone? How can we know what our culture is? Is that culture immutable? And if it changes, how does it change? It goes without saying that an understanding of what exactly culture is will help us deal with the rest of the globe,402 but its value begins at home. To understand the nature of culture will not solve our problems. But understanding that we all have scripts — to which we may or may not adhere but which are ours nonetheless — might at least help us begin to see ourselves as the actors that we are, and to speak to other actors in a new way

Source 3: https://www.texasobserver.org/cut-from-the-same-cloth-hijab-in-houston/