In this article, we reexamine the concept of ‘acculturation’ in cross-cultural psychology, especially with respect to non-western, non-European immigrants living in the United States. By drawing primarily on postcolonial scholarship, we specifically reconsider the universalist assumption in cross-cultural psychology that all immigrant groups undergo the same kind of ‘psychological’ acculturation process. In so doing, (1) we consider some of the historical and political events related to immigration in the United States; (2) we question the conflation of nation with culture that emerges in many theories of acculturation; (3) we use the notion of diaspora as theorized in postcolonial studies to rethink the concept of ‘integration strategy’ as developed in cross-cultural psychology. Our article has implications for general issues of culture and self in human development, and particular issues in the area of acculturation.

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This article outlines a dialogical approach to understanding how South Asian-American women living in diasporic locations negotiate their multiple and often conflicting cultural identities. We specifically use the concept of voice to articulate the different forms of dialogicality-polyphonization, expropriation, and ventriloquation-that are involved in the acculturation experiences of two 2nd-generation South Asian-American women. In particular, we argue that it is important to think of acculturation of the South Asian-American women as essentially a contested, dynamic, and dialogical process. We demonstrate that such a dialogical process involves a constant moving back and forth between various cultural voices that are connected to various sociocultural contexts and are shaped by issues of race, sexuality, and gender.

We begin by outlining that the dialogical self may be conceived from the point of view of the self- fuland the self- lessperspectives. Both these perspectives of self-work involve different assumptions about what should be the starting point of the I-position of the dialogical self. These assumptions need to be made explicit because they provide the key to explaining how Ipositions get transformed in the process of entering into a dialogical relationship with the other. Furthermore, we argue that in order to explain how dialogue occurs, and how the I-positions are organized and reorganized by the individual, a developmental framework may be necessary. We believe that the dialogical model is extremely relevant in the age of transnational migration and diasporic cultures. However, the challenge, for the theory of a dialogical self, is to explain how individuals living with hybridized and hyphenated identities in borderland cultures and diasporic communities coordinate their incompatible and often conflicting cultural and personal positions.

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