From Ius Sanguinis to Ius Agendi: insights from a Hongkonger Ethnolanguaging as Korean

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the complexities of crossing into, and passing as a member of, a national imaginary that conceives of itself through a myth of ethnic homogeneity, or ius sanguinis (‘right of blood’). It analyzes an ethnically Han Chinese Hongkonger’s metapragmatic reflections on her experiences developing a high level of proficiency in Korean and subsequently passing as ethnolinguistically Korean in both Korea and in her homeland of Hong Kong. Her experiences are representative of a highly complex semiotic and embodied process that can also implicate oneself in fraught spaces of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and neonationalism. More significantly, her experiences provide an opportunity to reconsider ethnic national identification not merely as ius sanguinis but through an alternative paradigm of ‘ius agendi’, or ‘right of performance’. Understood from the perspective of ius agendi, ethnolinguistic groups are not static a priori entities but are instead actively ‘disinvented’ and ‘reconstituted’ [Makoni, S., and A. Pennycook. 2005. Disinventing and (re)constituting languages. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 2, no. 3: 137–56] through the performative practice of what I term ‘ethnolanguaging’, which affords a range of outcomes including ethnolinguistic identification and disaffiliation.

KEYWORDS:

• Crossing
• passing
• ethnicity
• ethnolanguaging
• Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jerry Won Lee is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include The Politics of Translingualism (Routledge 2017) and Korean Englishes in Transnational Contexts (co-edited with Christopher J. Jenks, Palgrave MacMillan 2017), along with articles on topics related to critical applied linguistics and the sociolinguistics of globalization.

Notes

1. A vast majority of Korean names are comprised of a one syllable surname (e.g., Lee, Kim, Park) and a two-syllable given name (e.g., Ji-Yeon, Sang-Kyu). The name Jina can actually be represented as Jin-a (진아) or as Ji-na (지나). Jina simply prefers Jin-a.

2. Admittedly, we might say that the merchant did nothing wrong and is simply obeying the law by checking the IDs of foreigners. But, as Jina’s angry reaction suggests, she felt that he was discriminating against her friend by asking for a passport instead of a foreign driver’s license, thus requiring an extra layer of scrutiny that he perhaps would not have applied for a local. In fact, Jina notes that after the unpleasant encounter her friend was able to purchase cigarettes from an adjacent store without any harassment.