We advance "incorporation" as a new way to understand immigrant identities as sutured within and sustaining symbolic and material structures of racial inequality. Incorporation elucidates the interlacing of the multidimensional symbolic and material processes overlooked in theorizing adaptation, assimilation, and integration as forms of cultural change in immigrants. We examine how the material and the symbolic articulate in claims to belonging and alignment with whiteness. We demonstrate that Polish immigrants' narratives of racial identities in (post)apartheid South Africa have been shaped by specific institutional and economic structures regulating immigration and labor. The study also advances understanding of whiteness in its global and culturally specific dimensions. © 2012 Copyright National Communication Association.

Incorporation immigrants Identity whiteness race

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