My Cannibalized Self: An Autoethnography. Biliteracy Development in Japanese Heritage Language Study

My Cannibalized Self: An Autoethnography of Biliteracy Development in Japanese Heritage Language Study is the author's personal account of his attempt to learn Japanese through a masters program in Japanese-English technical translation. Through descriptions of his lived experience as a biracial Japanese American and a lifetime of attempts to learn his heritage language in various contexts, this narrative captures how he used autoethnography and a framework of cannibalism to transform the frustrations and failures he perceived in the acquisition of his heritage language to form a bilingual, bicultural self and a new relationship with Japanese that embraces all of his linguistic and cultural heritage and breaks from the monolingual norms that had damaged his sense of self as a speaker of Japanese. Through this process, he developed a form of autoethnographic writing that he termed the anthropophagic crafting of the self to create a new, agentive sense of bilingual and bicultural identity formation and method of heritage language study in which heritage language learners cannibalize their cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge and lived experience to develop a complex, dynamic sense of self as (emerging) bilinguals which counters the normativizing violence they face in acquiring their home language. This conception of bilingualism, biculturalism, and biliteracy development is meant to foster an appreciation for the linguistic and cultural heritage of heritage speakers that is often devalued by larger society and the dominant culture while honoring the other influences that make up their dynamic language system and complex identity through an agentive process of cultural transformation in which heritage language learners craft their identities specific to who they are as individuals and how they craft their sense of identity. This study is simultaneously an account that provides new, nuanced understanding of the obstacles that he and many heritage speakers face, a celebration of what heritage language study has the potential to be both for the well-being of the whole person and for her language development, and an in-depth treatise on an autoethnographic method that details the iterative writing process that forms the basis of this conception of identity formation, heritage language study, cultural transformation, and therapeutic process of self-acceptance.