Revisiting cross-cultural adaptation: An embodied approach

ABSTRACT

This article provides an embodied approach to theorizing cross-cultural adaptation. I argue that a more diverse and holistic view of adaptation pays attention to the body as an experiencing subject in adaptation contexts. Engaging body geopolitics as guiding a concept, embodied approach to adaptation is a processual experiential approach in which the body engages intersubjective interactions that shapes a newcomer’s adaptation experiences. Using the autoethnographic analytic method, I examined my adaptation experiences as an African postcolonial migrant in the United States. I categorized these experiences into three interconnected situations: the felt geographies of my body, the corporeal experience of adaptation, and disidentification and geopolitics of my body. I theorized that adaptation is non-linear, and its complexity can be understood when the body is studied as the adapting subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-cultural adaptation
• embodiment
• geopolitics of the body
• otherness
• space

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the National Communication Association (NCA) annual convention in November 2021 in the International and Intercultural Communication Division and received Top Student Paper and Ralph Cooley awards. I would like to thank Drs. Sachi Sekimoto, Shinsuke Eguchi, Christopher Brown, Godfried Asante, and Michael Lechuga for their detailed feedback, support, and mentorship, along with Dr. Lisa Hanasono for her constructive comments and encouragement. I would also like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback. This manuscript would not be what it is without your care and attention to my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term newcomer here is loosely used as signifier for all new entrants into new cross- cultural spaces over an extended period. In other words, the newcomer does not arrive subjectless but with multilayered subjectivities through their experiences as raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized minorities in new environments. My usage of newcomer in this regard centers minoritarian subjects and politics of difference in identity constitution. Without generalizing, therefore, this approach affirms differential adaptation specifically as they are processed through identity politics of new environments.

2 This usage suggests spaces in which the body becomes materially and discursively meaningful. Also, my use of geopolitics of the body signifies context-specific bodily responses to power relations in intercultural communication situations.

3 The postcolonial body is an Otherized subject manifesting and reliving the regimes of the body as an Other in both social interactions and in instances of sociopolitical power relations. The phrase postcolonial African bodies in America, therefore, signifies how my body takes a new appendage as African and postcolonial. Shang (2016) argued that “the realities of the postcolonial regimes are still hinged on corporal differences that make distinctions, however subtle, between bodies with surplus other and those with a deficit of power” (p. 143). My body occupies the latter in this instance.

4 “Monkey thing” was the reaction of a librarian to an African friend and his African American buddy who requested a private study room in the University library. Although my friend did not catch the racist motivations behind “doing monkey thinks” in the library, his buddy slogged it out with the librarian who eventually apologized. In another instance, this typifies the ways in which our bodies react differently to historical marginalization that made the White librarian feel comfortable to make such comments to an African accented body since he did not have any way of knowing his buddy’s ethnicity. Hence, my African body, as my friend’s alike, becomes platform for hegemonic ideas to pass unquestioned because of sociopolitical practices that silence African postcolonial bodies within larger discourses of global history, politics, and economy (Ibelema, 2014).

5 Notions of submissiveness and incapability to pull a fight when our identities are called into question. The library interaction between my friend and his buddy also attested to this: That instead of resisting racist and hegemonies ideologies in the U.S., African bodies, through politics of silence or excuses of unbelonging, lets these moments pass. The same friend, in a different phone conversation between a White lady and I, noted that I should avoid repeating that “I’m sorry” at every moment I respond to White Americans. She noted that it makes it seem like I’m discursively feeling sorry for who I am or where I come from. Hence, understanding these layers of host environment communication practices and identity politics becomes an important bodily assignment that every minoritarian bodies, in this case, Africans must factor into their adaptation experiences.