Naerisarang (내리사랑), Or an Elder’s Love for the Young: Vietnamese and Filipina Marriage Migrants as Preservers of the Korean Patriline

The idea of maternal citizenship and reproductive duties as a way of both assimilating and othering Filipina and Vietnamese foreign wives in South Korea plays out in both public multiculturalist discourse and within household discussions. Ethnic nationalism, neo-Confucianism, and government/media discourses have helped to structure how migrant mothers and their families are portrayed and how they portray themselves. I argue that even as state and civil society pressures marriage migrants from Southeast Asia to become “Korean” mothers and daughters-in-law, migrants and their families influence how such an identity is defined by taking advantage of the media’s influence and the government’s authority within these roles and utilizing the resources they receive to improve their status in Korea. In short, I examine how Filipina and Vietnamese marriage migrants reproduce and raise “Korean” children, integrate them into Korean society, while at the same time, using their position in society to maintain and introduce to their children the traditions and customs of their home country. I use data collected from participant observation and interviews with these families and organization members in order to examine how national and family identity is shaped by marriage migrants for themselves and for their children while at the same time having to work within severe constraints

\u201cIDENTITY ON THE MOVE\u201d FOOD, SYMBOLISM AND AUTHENTICITY IN THE ITALIAN-AMERICAN MIGRATION PROCESS

Il mio lavoro di ricerca rappresenta un contributo allo studio dell'esperienza umana dello \u201cspazio alimentare\u201d come costruzione sociale che comprende sia i modelli del comportamento umano, e la loro relazione sensoriale con uno specifico luogo, sia l'imprenditoria etnica. Il nucleo di questo progetto di ricerca \ue8 rappresentato da un\u2019indagine multi-generazionale del multiforme processo della migrazione italiana in America, laddove la cultura alimentare viene utilizzata come veicolo per esaminare come gli immigrati abbiano prima perso e poi negoziato una nuova identit\ue0 in terra straniera. Lo scopo generale della tesi \ue8 quello di esaminare come il cibo rappresenti un collegamento nostalgico con la patria per la prima generazione, un compromesso culturale per la seconda e un modo per rinegoziare un'etnia ibrida per le generazioni successive. La lente del cibo \ue8 anche utilizzata per esplorare lo sviluppo dei ristoranti italiani durante il Proibizionismo e il loro ruolo nel processo di omogeneizzazione culinaria e di invenzione della tradizione nel mondo contemporaneo. Per spiegare come la cucina regionale in America sia diventata un simbolo collettivo di etnia e abbia potuto creare un'identit\ue0 Italo-Americana nazionale distinta da quella italiana, ho adottato il modello creato da Werner Sollors e Kathleen Neils Cozen e sintetizzato con l'espressione di \u201cinvenzione dell'etnia\u201d. Il capitolo di apertura esplora la migrazione su larga scala che ha colpito l'Italia e la storia economica italiana per oltre un secolo e prosegue con un\u2019analisi storica sullo sviluppo dei prodotti alimentari nel tempo. La prima sezione evidenzia il significato culturale dell'alimento e il suo ruolo nella costruzione di un'identit\ue0 nazionale oltre i confini italiani e prosegue con un\u2019analisi sulla successiva variazione delle abitudini alimentari durante l'immigrazione di massa. Il capitolo conclude illustrando il quadro teorico utilizzato per teorizzare le diverse dimensioni dell'etnia. Partendo dall'ipotesi che l'identit\ue0 sia un elemento socialmente costruito e in continua evoluzione, il secondo capitolo \ue8 dedicato all'analisi della natura mutevole del cibo, esplorata attraverso tre distinti ma spesso sovrapposti tipi di spazio: spazio della "memoria individuale"; spazio della "memoria collettiva"; spazio della "tradizione inventata". Lo spazio della \u201cmemoria individuale\u201d esplora come i primi immigrati italiani tendevano a conservare le loro tradizioni regionali. Al contrario lo spazio della memoria collettiva osserva il conflitto ideologico emerso tra la prima e la seconda generazione di immigrati italiani, in risposta alle pressioni sociali del paese ospitante. L'analisi termina con la rappresentazione di generazioni successive impegnate a ricreare una cultura separata di cibo come simbolo dell'identit\ue0 creolata. Il capitolo tre, il primo capitolo empirico della dissertazione, attraverso l'analisi della letteratura migrante mostra l'importanza del cibo italiano nella formazione dell'identit\ue0 italo- americana. Questa letteratura ibrida esamina il ruolo degli alimenti nelle opere letterarie italo-americane di seconda, terza e della generazione contemporanea di scrittori. Il quarto capitolo completa la discussione seguendo la saga del cibo italiano dai primi ristoranti etnici a buon mercato, frutto della tradizione casalinga italiana, fino allo sviluppo di un riconoscibile stile di cucina italo-americano. A questo proposito, i ristoranti rappresentano una "narrazione" etnica significativa che riunisce aspetti economici, sociali e culturali della diaspora italiana in America e fa luce sull'invenzione del concetto di tradizione culinaria italiana dietro le cucine americane. La sezione termina con un'esplorazione del problema moderno relativo al fenomeno dell\u2019Italian "Sounding" negli Stati Uniti, basato sulla creazione di immagini, colori e nomi di prodotti molto simili agli equivalenti italiani, ma senza collegamenti diretti con le tradizioni e la cultura italiana. Il capitolo finale fornisce una visione etnografica su ci\uf2 che significa essere italo-americani oggi e come i ristoranti italiani negli Stati Uniti soddisfano la tradizione culinaria Italiana nel mondo contemporaneo americano. Per concludere, considerando le teorie dell'invenzione della tradizione, due casi di studio esplorativi a Naples, in Florida, vengono presentati sia per analizzare come gli italo-americani contemporanei manifestano la loro etnia attraverso il cibo etnico sia per esaminare come il cibo italiano viene commercializzato nei ristoranti etnici degli Stati Uniti, alla luce della del processo di globalizzazione

Sex in the Kitchen: The Re-interpretation of Gendered Space Within the Post-World War II Suburban Home in the West

In the decades following 1945, Americans moved increasingly out of cities into suburbs. The migration illustrated the emergence of a new, broader middle class as a result of growing postwar affluence. In the previous half-century, families living in a suburb could claim middle-class status. The emerging class built its identity on the forms and values adopted from this earlier, more affluent Victorian middle class. These adopted values were played out in a home designed around Progressive era ideals of the family. Through this Progressive filter, the new concept of the home was scaled down, without servants, and ceased existing wholly as the wife\u27s sphere of influence--as in the Victorian version. The Progressive impulse also reduced the size of the house to make it more efficient, and through government subsidies shaped the home into a smaller, economically sized package. The financial framework that determined the shape of the postwar home also influenced the technology placed within its walls. This financially influenced technology particularly affected the shape and content of the kitchen. The new, efficient kitchen did not release women from their duty to provide daily family meals, but it did create a culturally safe space for men to cook as a hobby. In the postwar, suburban kitchen women and men contended with economic pressures and changing social realities which complicated the Victorian values and Progressive ideals. Middle-class women needed to leave the home for work, and--now separated from traditional urban social outlets--middle-class men sought refuge in the suburban home. By examining Sunset magazine\u27s Chefs of the West column, traditional women\u27s cookbooks and service magazines, men\u27s magazines, building industry trade journals, and census reports, the kitchen demonstrates that women and men reshaped the home in response to changing middle-class values. While financing regulations at first shaped how the emerging middle class lived within the postwar, suburban home, residents reinterpreted the space as a reaction to the economic changes around them. This cycle continued with each new interpretation of the postwar single-family home

On representation learning for generative models of text

Cette thèse fait des petits pas dans la construction et la compréhension des systèmes d'apprentissage des représentations neuronales et des modèles génératifs pour le traitement du langage naturel. Il est présenté comme une thèse par article qui contient quatre travaux. Dans le premier article, nous montrons que l'apprentissage multi-tâches peut être utilisé pour combiner les biais inductifs de plusieurs tâches d'apprentissage auto-supervisées et supervisées pour apprendre des représentations de phrases distribuées de longueur fixe à usage général qui obtiennent des résultats solides sur les tâches d'apprentissage par transfert en aval sans tout modèle de réglage fin. Le deuxième article s'appuie sur le premier et présente un modèle génératif en deux étapes pour le texte qui modélise la distribution des représentations de phrases pour produire de nouveaux plongements de phrases qui servent de "contour neuronal" de haut niveau qui est reconstruit en mots avec un récurrent neuronal autorégressif conditionnel décodeur. Le troisième article étudie la nécessité de représentations démêlées pour la génération de texte contrôlable. Une grande partie des systèmes de génération de texte contrôlables reposent sur l'idée que le contrôle d'un attribut (ou d'un style) particulier nécessite la construction de représentations dissociées qui séparent le contenu et le style. Nous démontrons que les représentations produites dans des travaux antérieurs qui utilisent la formation contradictoire du domaine ne sont pas dissociées dans la pratique. Nous présentons ensuite une approche qui ne vise pas à apprendre des représentations démêlées et montrons qu'elle permet d'obtenir des résultats nettement meilleurs que les travaux antérieurs. Dans le quatrième article, nous concevons des modèles de langage de transformateur qui apprennent les représentations à plusieurs échelles de temps et montrent que ceux-ci peuvent aider à réduire l'empreinte mémoire importante de ces modèles. Il présente trois architectures multi-échelles différentes qui présentent des compromis favorables entre la perplexité et l'empreinte mémoire.This thesis takes baby steps in building and understanding neural representation learning systems and generative models for natural language processing. It is presented as a thesis by article that contains four pieces of work. In the first article, we show that multi-task learning can be used to combine the inductive biases of several self-supervised and supervised learning tasks to learn general-purpose fixed-length distributed sentence representations that achieve strong results on downstream transfer learning tasks without any model fine-tuning. The second article builds on the first and presents a two-step generative model for text that models the distribution of sentence representations to produce novel sentence embeddings that serves as a high level ``neural outline'' that is reconstructed to words with a conditional autoregressive RNN decoder. The third article studies the necessity of disentangled representations for controllable text generation. A large fraction of controllable text generation systems rely on the idea that control over a particular attribute (or style) requires building disentangled representations that separate content and style. We demonstrate that representations produced in previous work that uses domain adversarial training are not disentangled in practice. We then present an approach that does not aim to learn disentangled representations and show that it achieves significantly better results than prior work. In the fourth article, we design transformer language models that learn representations at multiple time scales and show that these can help address the large memory footprint these models typically have. It presents three different multi-scale architectures that exhibit favorable perplexity vs memory footprint trade-offs

"Family is Really All Over The Place:" Ethnic Identity Formation Within A Transnational Network

This dissertation explores the process of ethnic identity formation in immigrants from the Campania region of Italy who settled in Ontario (Canada) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) after the Second World War. It centres on the collection of twenty-five original testimonies from narrators from the Campania who travelled from Italy between 1949 and 1979. Testimonies are complemented by ethnic newspaper archives and a diverse collection of archival materials from Canada, Argentina, and Italy. Campani understood their ethnic identities not via national boundaries, nor by a hyphenated or binary relationship; they did so using a shared imagined space that formed part of a multi-directional and transnational network, a mental map that included nodal points across the globe. This project argues that the identity of Campani depended less on formalized ethnic associations and more on informal networks of family to develop a sense of identity. Focusing on this unorganized group offers an intriguing perspective on how immigrants develop ethnic identities in situations where regional ties or formalized institutions are not strong enough to adhere to as a viable source of ethnic identity. Women were a vital part of these transnational networks, and this dissertation explores how networks of transmission work within this category of analysis. Language, food, and music are some of the means of forging and affirming ethnic identity that operate within the transnational network. Hyphenated identities are unsatisfactory, since they rely on a linear connection between two places and obfuscate the existence of other nodal spaces. Instead, Campani turned to other identifiers for constancy. Discussions of identity centre on the family or use familial terms to describe that tension. Campani had multiple identifiers at their disposal, and they adopted them strategically to navigate the situation at hand. The dissertation complicates the presence of hybrid or hyphenated identities by considering the vast but understudied transnational network that provided Campani with a domain for ethnic identity formation. It explores immigration as a process of non-linear mobility that transcends borders by creating nodes of settlement and streaks of movement that together create a picture of how identity is defined

Italian American identity: A hermeneutic examination of Tampa's Italian community.

This study focuses on how diverse interpretations of ethnicity within the United States produce meaning for Italian Americans. Research regarding Italian Americans and the effects of negative stereotypes, cultural products, and organized crime is plentiful, but the dialogue concerning the de-ethnicizing effect of assimilation on Italian American culture is limited (Barolini, 1985; Tamburri, 1998). Assimilation carries a specific discourse that functions as both an ideology and a system of control. As an ideology, it offers a positivistic solution to the dilemma of human difference. As a system of control, it organizes peoples' lives into a one-size-fits all framework. Moreover, the communication field, and the social sciences in general, lack a clear understanding of what it means to be both Italian and American at the same time because there is no consensus on its singular definition (Krase, 2005). The object of this study is to develop insights that allow communication scholars to understand the intercultural complexity associated with an "assimilated status" and to explore the dynamics of this culturally produced truth. This study attempts to look beyond the external signs of pragmatic assimilation and reveal the internal expression of Italian American culture. This study is a hermeneutic examination of the assimilated status of Italian Americans and the application of the assimilation narrative told by and for the Italian American community. Finally, this research builds and extends on research in cultural fusion and contributes to our understanding of the culturally fused experience of Italian American Identity

Return Migrations, Assimilation, and Cultural Adaptations among Mexican American Professionals from the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas

Studies of Mexican American integration have come to a methodological and theoretical impasse. Conventional investigations have provided limited insight as they are outsider-based perspectives examining native-born minorities within the context of the immigrant experience and race-cycle paradigms. Grounded in cultural ideologies and nationalist narratives, dominant descriptions of minorities have created a conceptual straight that circumscribes the discourse to assimilationists’ models of integration. Moreover, studies of marginal groups produce negative consequences by highlighting cultural differences that tautologically reinforce the grounds for exclusions. Little grounded work has been conducted specifically looking at racialized native-born minorities and the dynamics of their generational process of integration. Through embedded ethnography and the narratives of subject participants, this research provides direct insight into processes of contemporary integration and the social structural accommodation of native-born Mexican Americans. As a means of sidestepping conceptual barriers, this discussion theoretically frames the integration of Mexican American professionals within the context of modernity and liberal human development. By responding to the above critiques, this paper presents an alternative approach to the analysis and explanation of the roots of race-cycle paradigms in the first section. The second section establishes the context for the research and explains the basis for the papers structure and conceptual arguments. As a means of moving the discourse away from established models, the third section provides a critical overview of the classical and contemporary literature on minority integration through a process of textual deconstruction. In addition, the section also constructs a theoretical dynamic between structural determinations and individual adaptations to modernity that promotes integration. The fourth section describes the non-traditional method of data collection that provides direct insight into the processes of native-born minority cultural and structural incorporation. Through participant voices, the fifth section describes how individual interactions and institutional forces are shaping the social place that Mexican American professionals have created on the borderlands of American culture and society. What the interpretive findings suggest in the last section is that they are constructing and re-defining their own social and cultural place out of the elements that modern society provides and not as race-cycle theory predicts