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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.