Individual Medium Post #2
During this quarter, we came across many kinds of readings, some that have dealt with capitalist groups making their way into foreign lands, the struggle of maintaining a culture, discrimination and so on. Some examples of these kinds of relations were the readings about the Chinese in Honolulu and Jamaica, Korean people in Japan and Okinawan people. They each went through their own struggle where some were made to abandon what they know and live in an unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcoming environment. They each attempted to maintain the practices of their cultures regardless of the backlash they would get from it. The Chinese created “Chinatown” in order to keep their culture alive while the Okinawan people had a reformation to preserve theirs and so on. For me, I find that “cultural productions” are mostly influential in determining peace between those capital groups and the foreign lands they attempt to peacefully settle in. It is heavily influenced by the internal struggles happening in the political part of things and can be expressed through the arts, literature and so on.
Minorities struggle with self identity for they are stripped of the culture they know and are pressured and discriminated enough against to fall back onto the practices of the land they are settling in. They may also feel a great difference between themselves and their surroundings which can cause them to compare the two and attempt to leave their own culture in order to fit in. This can be seen not only in our history, but even in present day from large scale examples to small scale examples. For examples, Native Americans still attempt to practice their traditions in their culture in present day, even thought more than 70% of Native Americans live off reservation which means they are mixed in with the bigger population. Till this day, there have been a lot of contributions from Native American culture especially in art, language etc.
For me, I came from an Arabic household and I grew up listening to my parents’ heavy accents which in turn put me in the situation where I couldn’t correctly pronounce some of the most random words like “Jacuzzi”, “drawer” etc. Also, I would always hide my lunch growing up because other students would always make fun of my mother’s traditional cooking that looked and smelled different from the typical American lunch. The one thing that actually helped me in my Arabic culture was my extremely hospitable and welcoming household that helped a shy girl like me to make many close friends. I firmly believe that cultural productions effect people’s way of thinking and how they respond to the exposure of culture.
