George Blaustein, an editor of the European Review of Books and a professor of American Studies in Amsterdam, wrote an essay in The Dial about teaching American Studies in Europe. It’s a very good piece about the widening and now narrowing of “American Studies” and America as a place (and a story) that ends with this line:
“America” can then be contemplated not as, say, the paradigmatic promised land, nor as an irresistible future, nor as an inevitably decadent Rome, but rather as a place (or a non-place) that one visits and, more importantly, leaves — or never even goes to."
Like George, I’m an American living abroad, and in my case, for a host of reasons more tedious to lay out than complicated yet more personal than I care to divulge. However, I can say it’s not a Trump-related critique per se; even if Harris had won, the fundamentals of the country are not only unattractive to me, they seem intractable, deeply so (so don’t get at me with the yes we can changism). At its most reductive you could say that I hate cars.
But Blaustein's last line has stuck with me – “America as a place to leave.” I think I always believed that. I had some early experiences abroad that clarified this for me, even though I was often among people who wanted to get to America for one reason or another, even though I eventually returned myself. During that time in America (roughly 1992 to 2017) I living among Americans who never considered leaving the country but for whom internal migration was a fact of life–and so the next step, going across national borders, should be thinkable. Yet it wasn't.
I have often felt part of the front edge of an American diaspora that’s now coming into view. I realize there has always been a small but constant outflow, and a lot of that among African Americans (I wrote my undergrad thesis about Richard Wright, who left the US and never went back), but for the most part, the story of migration and America is overwhelmingly about coming to the US, not leaving it, so there isn’t a codified cultural narrative about leaving. Not yet. If you’re Irish, or Indian, or Italian, dealing with second or third generation immigrants to America who are returning to the “mother country” for an experience with authenticity is a codified thing. (I’m not familiar with African pop culture so I can’t talk about that, plus I’m can’t live with the asymmetry of “Africa,” a continent, next to “Italy,” a country. But I imagine there is some narrative about reverse migrations.)
But it's not just about leaving, the directionality of mobility. A diasporic sensibility means a culture, from novels to films to jokes, that’s bound up in nostalgias and regrets, guilts and ambitions, diverse sorts of mobilities and socializations. A culture of back and forths and back and forths, some physical, some in your mind, some fraught with peril, others mundane. Something you point to and say, that’s the stuff of my everyday.
Among its many uses the people who live in your home country can use it to code you. Right now, if you’re an American living abroad, you are treated as if you’re on some other plane of existence, maybe not quite dead yet but not fully engaged with the world of the living, which is America. I wish that other Americans would lose their sense that America is the only place to be, and come to see, like me, that America is just another place, one you can leave. And that that’s what I did – I left.
