Description
In this study, I determine how modern-day, ittengo (1.5 generation), mixed-race Japanese Americans identify in conversation with other Asian/Americans while podcasting and discussing experiences and identity. With a cultural rhetorics informed methodology, I research podcasts featuring Japanese American speakers who are both ittengo and mixed-race. After I locate applicable podcast series with four flexible properties (popularity, subject, recurrence, and reception), I eliminate podcast episodes using determinants for applicability to this study, including discussions about race, identity, or personal experiences without exceptions due to career or age. Ultimately, I rhetorically analyze two episodes total, one from the series Feeling Asian and a second from The Big Root. Through careful analysis, I theorize shared and individualized identificational themes across two guest speakers and one co-host. I discovered four shared themes: circumstance, Japanese ethos, language, and appearance. Meanwhile, additional individualized themes relate to one speaker describing how her Blackness influenced her identification and another two who contend with names’ impact on a sense of inclusion. The speakers’ stories and experiences illustrate the conflict within the third space and the sheer changeable of self-identification. The speakers’ externalized reflections demonstrate their rhetorical practices, manifested in their negotiations with external and internal forces. As I articulate the speakers’ rhetorical practices through the themes that I describe, their rhetorical identification is best understood as a rhetoric of becoming due the ongoing and flexible nature of their identification.
