Meandering Identities: Affective Dialogues across Continents

One facet of contemporary societies is their increasingly divers composition. In terms of its demographic composition, Luxembourg can in fact be described as super-diverse. The foreign population percentage stands at 47.5% and encloses migrants of different generation statuses and intentions to stay – ranging from a working day, to the length of a contract to permanence. Luxembourg is a trilingual country, with English and Portuguese being widely spoken as well. Luxembourg thus provides a rich context for identity construction. The majority of immigrants have European roots, but there is an increasing number of foreigners with a non-European background. We explored the identity-construction processes of eight Japanese women who had moved to Luxembourg. In particular, we were interested in the negotiation process or cultural dialogues these Japanese women engage in following their move to Luxembourg. Multicultural Luxembourg and homogenous Japan provide two very different cultural contexts and our aim was to understand if and how our subjects would engage in dialogues across continents.
As noted by Hermans (2001) I positions create dialogical relations with each other by reorganizing themselves in flexible ways from one position to another due to its context-dependency. In our qualitative study we prompted context by providing three sets of visual stimuli. The first set comprised typical images of Luxembourg, the second matched images of Japan and in the third set we presented hybrid images – juxtaposing Japanese and European images. Especially the reactions to the last set of primes prompted a dialogical narration – dialogical interactions between different I positions. For the majority of our subjects we observed a harmonious or flexible flow of I positions within the self – a meandering between reference points and experiences in Japan and Luxembourg. Some ambivalence and disharmonious dialogues could also be observed. Examples for these affective dialogues across continents will be presented.