Cultural Negotiation Quotes

I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

When you come from an immigrant home, you're in a whole different world until you leave your house. In my teenage years, I had to learn to switch cultures the second I left my house and, when I came back, to go back to my fundamentals.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

When you're part of a society where you're constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don't speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

One of the things about being raised British in Africa is that you get this double whammy of toughness. The continent in place itself made you quite tough. And then you've got this British mother whose entire being rejects 'coddling' in case it makes you too soft. So there's absolutely nothing standing between you and a fairly rough experience.

Artists who take on curatorial activities have the advantage of negating the professional hurdles and limitations comprising institutions.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.