Speaker
Description
The Sekai Uchinanchu Taikai takes place every five years, bringing together thousands of people of Okinawan descent (Uchinaanchu) from all over the world for a week of events in Okinawa. In this session, I will explore how participation in this event and others with members of Okinawan communities both in Okinawa and in diaspora, helped me to realize the extensive shared commonalities and parallels between the experiences of seemingly disparate immigrant, minority, diaspora communities. Additionally, I will illustrate the potential for employing those commonalities to build connections and to better understand ourselves and others, while inviting audience members to reflect upon their own experiences.
Whether as Uchinaanchu, as Jews, or as members of other communities, we each struggle – as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a people – with how to embody our ethnic or cultural identities and make that truly a part of who we are, while also dealing with the demands of everyday, modern, diaspora life. We wrestle with how to honor who our ancestors might have wanted us to be, and how to maintain traditions, while at the same time not preserving them unchanging as if in a glass jar. We alternate through generations dedicated to assimilation into a majority (e.g. American) identity, and those committed to reclaiming a connection with our heritage. Our ancestors’ suffering in the Holocaust, the Battle of Okinawa, and the Japanese-American internment camps make ideas of peace and freedom central to who we are today. Few of us are experts in the histories or cultural traditions of our ancestors; what we know best is the culture we have experienced in our own families and communities in diaspora – not something entirely of the past or of the “homeland,” but a diasporic version that is equally authentic.
Though our foods, music, languages, traditional festivals and observances, and countless other aspects of our cultures may be different, these parallels and commonalities provide valuable opportunities to bridge a gap, to connect with one another, and through discussions of differing experiences, to learn new things about not only one another, but also about ourselves and about immigrant, minority, diaspora identity and experience itself.