Globally connected yet culturally bound: Constructions of cultural alterity among African Americans and Kenyan immigrants

Through an examination of ethnic relations between African Americans and East African immigrants in Chicago, I describe how experiential differences and racial ideology affect the construction of cultural boundaries between diasporic populations of African descent. I explore how Kenyans as black immigrants, who bring a different level of race consciousness, confront being lumped into the category of "black" with African Americans and assess the role that globalized racial imagery plays in both constructing and deconstructing cultural boundaries. I focus on the tension between globalization and the proliferation of cultural identities, often characterized as a global tendency towards "homogenization" and "heterogeneity." This tension is treated uncritically in much postmodern theory that tends to fetishize circulation. Drawing on Neo-Boasian as well as phenomenological conceptualizations, I suggest a theoretical model that emphasizes both global interconnectedness as well as cultural difference. By seeking to elucidate the process of cultural boundary construction as well as transnational discourses of sameness, I demonstrate that these diasporic populations are involved in a continual dialectic of resistance to these hegemonic constructions that seek to dominate them.