Many dimensions of Asian American pan-ethnicity

Abstract

Asian Americans as a group consist of over 20 national origin groups with distinctive ethnicity, language, religion, cultural practices, immigration history, and perceptions of life in the United States. While “Asian American” has been interchangeably used to refer to both racial and pan-ethnic grouping of individuals of Asian heritage, the exact meaning of the term varies contextually by one's ethnicity, experiences, and other social, structural, and cultural characteristics. In this article, I investigate three distinctive ways in which Asian Americans understand and enact upon their pan-ethnicity: (a) as a political instrument, (b) as a social group identity, and (c) as a path of integration into the mainstream society. Then, I briefly discuss implications of pan-ethnicity for Asian Americans, before turning to the discussion of ways in which future research could further investigate the complexities of pan-ethnicity. I conclude by attempting to provide a nuanced definition of Asian American pan-ethnicity based on the literature reviewed in this article.