Abstract

Literature on contemporary immigrants suggest that increasing volume of transnational practices foster identity construction across borders, thereby disjoining geographical space and social space in which identities are constructed and negotiated. While studies pay increasing attention to the linkage between transnational organizing of economic and political activities and that identities among immigrant groups with high level of transnationalism, relatively less attention has been given to transnational identity construction of immigrant groups without high level of transnationalism. This study examines the identity dynamics among Korean military wives who do not have high level of transnationalism but negotiate their identities transnationally by way of various identity practices to imagine themselves as members of multiple communities across national and cultural boundaries. Based on thirty eight in-depth interviews with Korean military wives in the U.S., the study reveals that the non-mobile immigrants created multilayered “imagined communities” which converts their identities to be multiple identities. This study also indicates that this effort is the part of the non-mobile immigrants’ gradual adaptation to the U.S. society and resistance to assimilation.