ABSTRACT
Perhaps in a quest to understand what it feels like to be an immigrant, the author lived most of her adult life as an ex-pat. Being an African American resident of countries that are predominantly populated by Black and Brown people means that she live with the economic and political privilege of never being considered an immigrant. As an African American wanderlust, she have a certain level of contextual privilege via nationality and economics. Being a Muslim, Black, and cis-gendered woman, her intersectionality is always cause for situational interrogation. Ong’s theory focuses on phenomena she identified in East Asia, where she observed that people used their existing (or created a new) transnational identity to accumulate citizenships and residency rights, which allowed them to facilitate capital flows, establish multinational business ties, and instrumentalize globalization to their socio-economic benefit.
