Ethno-Racial Labels, Perceived Exclusion and Resistance: A Grounded Theory of American Migrants’ Experiences of Being the Other in China

Abstract

International migration is driven by migrating individuals’ desires to be recognized, accepted, and included by their destination societies. Unfortunately, migrating individuals often end up feeling excluded by specific ethno-racial labels, which are habitually used to highlight their distinctness from locals in the destination society and then differentiate them as out-group members or the Other in an over-simplistic way. In response to the perceived exclusion, migrating individuals would adopt a variety of strategies to resist ethnic labelling as a discourse of Othering. The resistance initiated by the Other has been long ignored, disregarded and even restricted in traditional intercultural communication studies which advocate migrating individuals’ alignments with the destination culture. Against this backdrop, this study attempts to examine American young expatriates’ experiences of being the Other in China as a representative case. Ethno-racial labels that exclusively attend to Americans’ non-Chinese phenotypic traits were perceived by these young Americans to generate an exclusionary discourse of Othering via homogenization, alienation and stigmatization. Out of antagonism towards the perceived exclusion, these Americans strategically initiated counter-discourse to resist ethnic labelling under the condition of being the Other in the Chinese context.