[Earlier this
year, I belatedly but excitedly got into The Americans, the FX drama about
two KGB agents (the great Keri
Russell and Matthew Rhys) living in deep cover as a married couple in
Reagan’s 1980s America. It’s a wonderful and very AmericanStudies show, so this
week I’ll AmericanStudy five issues and themes to which the show connects.
Leading up to my latest Guest Post on another set of pop culture texts and
questions!]
[FYI: SPOILERS
for the show’s most recent couple seasons in this post’s premise and specifics!]
On how a recent
plot twist can help us analyze a still-vital American issue.
Scholars who study,
analyze, and teach about immigration have long considered the question of distinct
generational experiences of movement and place, cultures and societies,
assimilation and resistance, and other related issues to be one of central
importance. To note one longstanding and influential example: in 1938,
pioneering immigration historian Marcus
Lee Hansen published his essay “The Problem of the Third
Generation Immigrant,” in which he developed what came to be known as
Hansen’s Law—that while 2nd-generation immigrants tend to move away
from their family’s old culture and toward that of their new setting, members
of the third generation often display a greater interest in and pull toward
that prior culture and heritage. While scholars have taken such analyses in
many different directions over the subsequent eighty years (including doing
away with the overt preference for assimilation that Hansen’s term “problem”
indicates), this question
of generational experience and perspective has remained a key one for those
studying and analyzing issues of immigration and identity (individual,
familial, and communal).
Whether we see
Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are immigrants or not (and I’ve made the case in
other posts in this series that we can and should see them that way), the fact
that their prior culture and heritage had been kept secret even from those
Americans closest to them (such as their two children) would seem to render
these generational questions irrelevant for any characters other than the
couple themselves. Yet in the third and (especially) fourth seasons, the show’s
writers have found a clever way to bring those questions into play: by
gradually introducing the possibility and then the reality of the Jennings’
teenage daughter Paige (played wonderfully by Holly Taylor) finding
out about their secret
identities and Russian heritage, and then by using that new knowledge and
perspective to drive a new and ongoing (as of the end of season four—the
penultimate season five will premiere in spring 2017) plot thread of Elizabeth
and Philip’s debate over whether and how to recruit Paige to join their spying
on behalf of the Soviet Union (and thus against the United States that has
comprised her homeland and heritage since birth).
Just as the
Jennings’ particular version of “immigration” differs widely from that of most
immigrant Americans, this question of Paige’s potential allegiance is clearly distinct
from other such debates for the children and descendents of immigrants. Or is
it? Far too often, immigrant Americans and their descendents have had to face
accusations of (at best) divided loyalties that position them quite directly as
potential “spies” or agents for a foreign nation (see: World
War I, World War
II, contemporary debates
about Muslim Americans…). One answer to such narratives, and a good one, is
to note the vital
roles immigrant Americans have instead played in protecting
and defending America throughout these periods and every other one. But to
my mind an even better answer is to note how many Americans—really all of us,
since Native Americans face their
own parallel version of these multiple allegiances—have dealt and continue
to deal with heritages that encompass distinct cultures and nations, including
but not at all limited to that of the United States. In this way, as in so many
others, The Americans offers a unique
and compelling lens on central American ideas and issues.
Guest Post this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other AmericanStudies shows you’d highlight?
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