The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (December 2021) |
Panethnicity is a political neologism used to group various ethnic groups together based on their related cultural origins; geographic, linguistic, religious, or "racial" (i.e. phenotypic) similarities are often used alone or in combination to draw panethnic boundaries. The term panethnic was used extensively during mid-20th century anti-colonial/national liberation movements. In the United States, Yen Le Espiritu popularized the term and coined the nominal term panethnicity in reference to Asian Americans, a racial category composed of disparate peoples having in common only their origin in the continent of Asia.[1][2]
It has since seen some use as a replacement of the term race; for example, the aforementioned Asian Americans can be described as "a panethnicity" of various unrelated peoples of Asia, which are nevertheless perceived as a distinguishable group within the larger multiracial North American society.
More recently[year needed] the term has also come to be used in contexts outside multiculturalism in US society, as a general replacement for terms like ethnolinguistic group or racial group.[clarification needed]
The concept is to be distinguished from "pan-nationalism", which similarly groups related ethnicities but in the context of either ethnic nationalism (e.g. pan-Arabism, pan-Celticism, pan-Germanism, pan-Indianism, pan-Iranism, pan-Slavism, pan-Turkism) or civic nationalism (e.g. pan-Africanism).