August 15, 2012: Birthday Best Redux

[Last year on my birthday, I highlighted 34 of my favorite posts from the blog’s first nine months. It was a fun way to look back on where I’d been, and also to highlight some past contributions for new readers. So with your indulgence, here are 35 of my favorites from the year since then! The series on fatherhood in America resumes tomorrow.]

August 16: Me Too: In which I follow up the birthday favorites by highlighting five posts that make clear just how much I too continue to learn about America.

August 23: Virginia, Cradle of American Studies: The first post in what I believe was my first series (now of course the blog’s central format), on a few of Virginia’s American Studies connections.

September 1: First Questions: A back to school post, highlighting both the role that teaching plays in my American Studying and my (continued!) desire for your input on my topics here.

September 2: Not Tortured Enough: On torture, American ideals and realities, and how contemporary politics and overarching American questions intersect.

September 12: The Neverending Story: Perhaps the most vital American Studies response I can imagine to September 11^th and its decade-long aftermath.

October 6: Native Voices: Linking the NEASA conference at Plimoth Plantation, the hardest part of my dissertation and first book, and a key American question.

October 11: Remembering an Iconoclastic Genius: One of my most important jobs here, I think, is to help us better remember important (and often inspiring) people and histories and stories that we’ve forgotten; Derreck Bell is one such person.

October 19: The Importance of Reading Ernest: Making the case for an under-read American great, and remembering to keep my literary interests present in this space at the same time.

November 7: Moments That Remain 1: The fall’s NEASA conference was one of the best weekends of my life, and it was very exciting to be able to bring a bit of it to the blog.

November 14: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 1: Of the few different ways I’ve tried to grapple with the Penn State scandal in this space, I think this series, using student voices and ideas to remember the best of what college should be, is my favorite.

November 28: Bond, Racist Bond?: It’s not easy to analyze something we love—but I tried that here, with one of my favorite films in my favorite series.

December 5: Defining Diversity: Transitioning from a topical post (one responding to other American commentators) to the continued development of my own ideas about American culture and identity.

December 12: Cross-Culture 1: It’s Not Only Rock and Roll: And then extending those ideas to one of the many different media, genres, and disciplines that American Studies helps us analyze.

December 19: Making My List 1: Memory Days: The Memory Days have become a separate and ongoing project and page here, but this is where they began.

December 29: Year in Review 4: School for Scandal: Another stab at Penn State—not searching for answers so much as highlighting some of the key American Studies questions.

January 4: Gaga for American Studies: What American Studies can help us see in and say about Lady Gaga. Enough said.

January 21: American Studies for Lifelong Learning: A series that helped me plan the spring semester, connect my teaching to this blog, and, in this case, move me toward both a new experience and what would turn out to be my third book.

January 23: Mexican American Studies: I’m maybe most proud of this series out of all that I’ve done in this space this year, and this is where it started.

February 2: The Three Acts of John Rocker: Trying to do complex justice to a figure and story that are both close to my heart (or at least the Atlanta Braves are) and easily over-simplified.

February 16: Remembering Yasuhiro Ishimoto: Another far-too forgotten figure, and a post inspired by an idea from a friend (which was the origin for the now-frequent crowd-sourced posts).

February 24: Detroit Connections: I think it’s fair to say that I hadn’t thought about this topic at all prior to coming up with the series and writing the post. That’s part of what a blog allows us to do, and while the results have to speak for themselves, I love the opportunity.

March 6: Celebrating Zitkala-Sa: The whole Women’s History series was a lot of fun, but any time I get the chance to recommend this unique and amazing author, I take it.

March 21: Balboa Park: Family vacations will never be the same, now that they’re part of my American Studying and blogging too. That’s fine by me.

March 27: Race and Danny Chen: Like the prior day’s subject, Trayvon Martin, Chen is a tragically killed American whose story we should all know and with which we have to engage.

April 4: Melville’s Confidence Man: A good reminder that both literature and laughter have their place on the blog too.

April 19: How Would a Patriot Act? Part Three: This post on the amazing and inspiring Yung Wing helped me continue developing book three.

April 26: Great American Stories, Part Four: One of the very best American short stories, by one of my very favorite authors.

May 10: Maurice Sendak: Sometimes I feel locked into a week’s series, but Sendak’s death reminded me that sometimes I need to shift gears and write about a topical and important subject.

May 29: Remembering Pat Tillman: I hope I did justice to the complexities and ambiguities in this American life and death; this remains by far my most-read post on the Open Salon version of this blog, so it seems like it struck a chord with folks.

June 2-3: Remembering or Commemorating War: Michael Kammen, Kurt Vonnegut and Clint Eastwood, and big American questions—if that’s not American Studying, what is?

June 12: Playing with America, Part 2: But this is American Studying too—analyzing some of the cultural and historical causes behind the hula hoop fad.

June 16-17: Crowd-sourced Post on Material Culture: My first crowd-sourced post, now one of my favorite aspects of the blog. Add your thoughts for this week’s!

July 6: Newton’s Histories, Part 5: To come full circle to the August 16^th post, Jonathan Walker reminds me of how much I still have to learn about American history and culture.

July 27: Jennings on the Long Haul: And the inspiring life and career of Frances Jennings reminds me of why continuing to learn, study, analyze, teach, and write about America is so important and so rewarding.

Here’s to another year of American Studying! The fatherhood series resumes tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What would you like to see in this space in the year to come?

8/15 Memory Day nominee (reader suggestion!): Julia Child, without whose unique and charismatic voice and presence American cooking, culture, and society would have been left significantly more hungry and less fun.  

August 14, 2012: Southern Sons

[To honor a week that began with my Dad’s birthday and includes my own, I’m featuring a series on fatherhood in American culture, history, and literature. This is the second in that series. Once again, the weekend’s post will be a crowd-sourced one, so please share your responses, ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and perspectives for that post!]

On the complex generational relationship that helps explain the Southern Renaissance.

It’s easy enough, and certainly not inaccurate, to characterize the group of Southern intellectuals and writers who formed the vanguard of the 1920s and 30s Southern Renaissance as profoundly conservative, as rebelling against radical and future-driven national and international movements and trends such as modernism, urbanization, and (eventually) the New Deal. This was the group, after all, who called themselves first the Fugitives and then the Agrarians, and whose collective writings culminated in the unquestionably conservative manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). No American Studiers worthy of the name could fail to take such historical and cultural contexts into consideration when analyzing why these young men (mostly) and women came together at this moment, and why they wrote and thought the things they did.

Yet there are other kinds of contexts that also inform any and every writer’s (and person’s) identity, perspective, and works, of course, and I believe a biographical one is particularly important when it comes to analyzing the Southern Renaissance figures. They were born around the turn of the 20^th century, which meant that their parents had been born, in most cases, just after the end of the Civil War; those parents were thus the children of both Civil War veterans and of the incredibly complex and fraught post-war period, the children of (among other things) both the Lost Cause and the New South. To take the Renaissance’s most enduring literary figure, for example: William Faulkner was born in 1897, to parents born in 1870 and 1871; his father Murry both tried to build the family’s railroad company and to carry on the legacy of his own grandfather, a writer and Civil War hero known as “The Old Colonel.” Is it any wonder, then, that young Quentin Compson is so obsessed with the voice and perspective of his father, Jason Compson, and of the family and Southern pasts about which he learns from Jason?

If we move beyond Faulkner, and into the works of the Fugitive and Agrarian writers who even more overtly self-identified as part of the Renaissance, we likewise find works and characters centered on—obsessed with, even—the legacies of their fathers. Perhaps no work better exemplifies that trend than Allen Tate’s historical and autobiographical novel The Fathers (1938), a text that engages in every tortured word with the legacies of the Civil War and its aftermath and of the familial and cultural issues raised therein. Far more ambiguous and complex, but perhaps even more telling of this father-centered trend, is Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Mortmain” (1960), a five-section elegy for Warren’s father; the first section is entitled “After Night Flight Son Reaches Bedside of Already Unconscious Father, Whose Right Hand Lifts in a Spasmodic Gesture, as Though Trying to Make Contact: 1955,” and while the subsequent four sections range far beyond that man and moment, they do so precisely to ground many other historical and cultural questions in that profoundly autobiographical starting point. As Warren’s life and career illustrate, the Southern Renaissance figures were not circumscribed by such generational relationships—but they were certainly influenced, and in many ways defined, by them.

Next father-focused post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?

8/14 Memory Day nominee: Ernest Thayer, the philosopher, journalist, and poet whose most defining legacy is as the author of the definitive poetic tribute to America’s national pastime.  

August 13, 2012: They Call Me Mr. Mom

[To honor a week that began with my Dad’s birthday and includes my own, I’m featuring a series on fatherhood in American culture, history, and literature. This is the first in that series. Once again, the weekend’s post will be a crowd-sourced one, so please share your responses, ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and perspectives for that post!]

On the ways in which we’ve come pretty far in the last few decades—and the ways in which we haven’t.

As representative cultural documents go, I’m not sure you can find a more embarrassingly telling one than the Michael Keaton film Mr. Mom (1983). Fired from his job and forced to stay home while his wife becomes the family’s sole breadwinner, Keaton’s character proves entirely, comically inept at—as just that minute and a half long trailer illustrates—vacuuming, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, child care, and even disposing of diapers in the trash, among other things. Even the film’s title alone makes clear that the very idea of a married man performing “Mom’s” roles is a source of comedy, a nonsensical paradox that can be solved only by Keaton’s manic eyebrow wiggling. While of course the film could be read as part of the decade’s backlash against feminism, or as symbolizing cultural fears about what the presence of more women in the workforce might mean, it also clearly reveals that the simple idea of a dad performing household activities was nothing short of ludicrous to many Americans in the early 1980s.

Much has changed in America in the three decades since that film’s release, of course, and one of the most striking such social changes has been the rise in the number of fathers who are identified as their children’s primary caregiver. Recent statistics for that trend can’t entirely be separated from the current recession, and thus from accidental situations and employment and role changes not unlike those in the movie. Yet I believe that the trend is also more long-term and intentional than that—my evidence is primarily anecdotal, but I can most definitely say that within the families of many friends and colleagues, and indeed across a high percentage of the families in my own generation with which I’m familiar, fathers are choosing to (at least) share evenly the duties of home and childraising and (in many cases, including my own) are because of circumstance, profession, and inclination taking on the majority of such duties. Call us Mr. Mom if you want—the title no longer carries the same humorous sting.

And yet. In a variety of ways, cultural narratives seem not to have changed nearly so much. Virtually every page of Parents magazine is directed specifically at moms; there will usually be one article per issue by a dad for dads or the like, but otherwise, this ostensibly gender-neutral publication remains overtly and overwhelmingly focused on moms. The same is true for almost every TV commercial for products for kids: “Mom, if you’re looking to feed your kids healthier…,” and so on. And while I know that such choices are at least partly based on business and basic statistics—if as the above article argues 35% of dads are the primary caregiver, that still means the majority of primary caregivers and thus readers/customers are moms—there are other cultural signs as well. One of the much-hyped new fall TV shows, for example, is called Guys with Kids, a title and set of marketing images that seem to suggest that the very idea of a man with kids remains a source of comic ridiculousness. But at least the guys are plural, so maybe Mr. Mom is evolving a bit. If so, I’d say it’s time.

Next father-focused post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses, ideas, or suggestions about fatherhood in America?

8/13 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two very different but equally interesting and influential 19^th century women, Lucy Stone and Annie Oakley.

August 12, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing Americans Abroad

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the next crowd-sourced post, drawn from responses and suggestions from readers and other American Studiers. Add yours below!]

S. Thomas Summers responds to the satire and Twain post by noting that “Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels contains some biting satire as well.” Later in the week, he nominates American Werewolf in London as another horror film about naïve Americans abroad.

Going back to a prior crowd-sourced post, on American Studies beach reads, Patricia Vandever (one of my high school English teachers and mentors!) highlights a couple with ties to this week’s series too: “Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, which is initially set in Ethiopia and follows a medical family’s joys and disappointments–heart wrenching at times, but it’s the kind of novel that pains you to finish it. I also adore anything by Alexander McCall Smith. He has a new series out called Corduroy Mansions that is delightful.”

And if I can add one more beach read nomination of my own, my most recently completed book and one of the first I’ve read for pleasure in far too long: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Harbach’s book isn’t about Americans abroad, but it does owe a great deal to one of the greatest American novels and one that focuses on a community of Americans away from their homelands: Moby-Dick.

Next series starts tomorrow!

Ben

PS. Any other responses or thoughts on this topic? Representations of Americans abroad you’d highlight?

8/12 Memory Day nominee: Cecil B. DeMille, one of America’s most significant and ground-breaking film directors, and a pop culture showman who combined P.T. Barnum with D.W. Griffith.

August 11, 2012: Rachel Collins’ Guest Post

[Rachel Collins earned her PhD from Syracuse University in 2010 and is currently an adjunct professor at Arcadia University where she teaches courses in composition and the geohumanities. Her research focuses on the geographic manifestations of class and power in American literature. Recent publications include "'Where all the ground is friendly': Subterranean Living and the Ethic of Cultivation in Willa Cather's My Antonia" in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment and "'Amid all the maze, uproar, and novelty': the Limits of Other-Space in Sister Carrie" in the book Geocritical Explorations.]

I vividly remember first time I watched Undercover Boss. It was on February 7, 2010, immediately following the New Orleans Saints’ 31-17 Super Bowl victory over the Indianapolis Colts. I, along with a record-breaking 38.6 million people, stuck around after the game to watch the premier of a new reality television show that promised to deliver a wealthy CEO picking up trash, cleaning toilets, and getting fired for doing it poorly.

Of course, the timing couldn’t have been better. Just sixteen months after the economic collapse of 2008, Americans were eager to see a CEO struggling to perform dirty, menial tasks, particularly as public anger continued to rise over the mismanagement of public bailout funds and news headlines decried the “golden parachutes” being handed out to disgraced executives.

The narrative formula Undercover Boss follows is simple enough: each episode features a corporate executive who dons a disguise and works an entry-level job alongside employees in his own company. But as I watched Larry O’Donnell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Houston-based Waste Management, grow a stubbly beard and exchange his designer suits for jeans and a baseball cap, I experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for I recognized a modern version of the nineteenth-century class-passing narratives that I research and teach. Dozens of these undercover narratives were published during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and they proved to be wildly popular. Like Undercover Boss, they were voraciously consumed by a populace angry about the material excesses of the rich and powerful, labor conditions that were increasingly exploitive, and the growing gap between prosperity and poverty.

Most famous among these earlier class-passing narratives is probably Stephen Crane’s 1894 “An Experiment in Misery,” published in the New York Press. Disturbed by the omnipresent homelessness he sees in New York City, Crane puts on a tattered set of clothes and spends the night in a seven-cent flophouse near Chatham Square, attempting to find out—as Jacob Riis had recently put it—“how the other half lives.”

As I watched the Undercover Boss premier, however, I was even more strongly reminded of the nineteenth century class-passing narratives authored by women, because they typically focused on sites of wage labor, as opposed to the alleyways and homeless shelters favored by male writers like Crane. In 1902, for example, Bessie Van Vorst, an upper middle class woman, left a comfortable home and traveled to Pittsburgh, where she posed as a working girl and took a job in a pickle factory. Describing her first day in the factory, Van Vorst writes, “My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness” (25). In fact, pain and physical injury are precisely the point for Van Vorst, for as she looks around they are what she sees in her fellow working girls. She repeatedly describes the women she meets as disfigured and endangered by the conditions of poverty, describing one as having “the appearance of a cave-bred creature” (42), while another woman has “arms, long and withered, [that] swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree” and another seems like a “mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a task” (19).

Van Vorst’s narrative purpose is to denounce the injustice inherent in Gilded Age class extremes, and to expose, as she says, that “this land which we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots are the employers-- the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose serfs are the labouring men and women” (9). Her method is to depict the hardships and struggles of working women by taking on their conditions as her own, and advocating for social change.

However, the seeming absence of any such social advocacy kept nagging at me on February 7, 2010, as I watched the Undercover Boss premier. For instance, near the end of the episode O’Donnell finds that his recent cost-cutting decision to downsize the Fairport, NY, staff has forced a young woman named Jaclyn Pilgrim to absorb the duties of several eliminated positions—she now functions as office manager, administrative assistant to the facility manager, scale operator, and scale supervisor. As O’Donnell follows her through a frenetic day, he is impressed with her work, but finds himself far more interested in her personal life. It turns out that Pilgrim has battled multiple forms of cancer, and when she kindly invites O'Donnell to dinner with her family, he also learns they are about to lose their home to rising property taxes that her salary can't cover.

O'Donnell is convinced that something is wrong with this picture, and because he sees Pilgrim as so personally admirable, he promises to promote her—to get her, individually, out of an untenable situation. Instructively, his solution is not to adjust the entire Rochester facility's pay-scale to keep wages in line with the region’s cost of living, nor is it to reverse the downsizing he'd ordered to ease pressure on the job site.

Indeed, throughout the series the titular undercover bosses never discover that their employees’ problems include structural disenfranchisement, corporate abuse, or unreasonable productivity demands. That kind of critique is simply not the point of the show. Instead, the goal of Undercover Boss is to tell positive stories about executives getting to know, and building affection for, their most loyal entry-level employees. At base, Undercover Boss seems to be network television’s attempt at rehabilitating the image of CEOs in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.

By comparison, Bessie Van Vorst’s 1902 class-passing narrative depicted an educated and genteel lady suffering bodily pain from the abuses of factory labor with the express purpose of horrifying readers, eliciting support for labor reform efforts, and rousing sentiment against the policies of owners and bosses. However, an undercover executive like Larry O’Donnell, who awkwardly struggles to perform the work he demands of his lowest-paid employees, is supposed to be comical. And what’s more, his good-natured stumbling functions to humanize the him, and positions the executive as the central figure with whom viewers sympathize and identify—which ultimately allows him to be positioned as the narrative hero who bestows gifts and favors on struggling employees.

Today, in a historical moment that is being heralded as a second Gilded Age, the resurgence of the class-passing narrative form that was popular in the first Gilded Age is not surprising. What is fascinating, however, is how this narrative form has been transformed so that it works against the goals of its earlier iterations. Such a profound transformation raises bigger questions: How does a genre of tragedy and social critique turn into one of comedy and heartwarming personal interest? How do we make sense of the American reluctance to see class as a collective situation or structural formation, but instead as a set of individual circumstances?

These are the issues running through my head as I watch shows like Undercover Boss. Readers, what about you? What’s your take on the cultural function of class-passing narratives?

[Ben’s PS. Well, what do you think, readers? And if you have any final responses or suggestions to the week’s posts and series on Americans abroads, please share them too, ahead of tomorrow’s crowd-sourced post!]

8/11 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two talented American writers, Sarah Piatt and Alex Haley, and one American Studier pére.

August 10, 2012: Tortured Travelers

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the fifth and final post in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the crowd-pleasing xenophobia at the heart of two recent hit films.

It’s hard to argue with success, and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) are by many measures two of the most successful films of the last decade. Hostel made more than $80 million worldwide (on a budget of $4.5 million), led to a sequel two years later, and contributed significantly to the rise of an entirely new sub-gerne (the horror sub-genre generally known as “torture porn”). Taken cost a lot more to make (budget of $25 million) but also made a lot more at the box office (worldwide gross of over $225 million), has its own sequel coming out later this year, and fundamentally changed the career arc and general perception of its star Liam Neeson. Neither film was aiming for any Oscars or to make the Sight and Sound list, but clearly both did what they were trying to do well enough to please their audiences and hit all the notes in their generic (in the literal sense) formulas.

What the two films were trying to do is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate (although Eli Roth is more than happy to tell us his take on what his film is about); moreover, they’re clearly very different from each other, in genre and goal and many other ways, and I don’t intend to conflate them in this post. Yet they both share an uncannily similar basic plot: naïve and fun-loving young American travelers are abducted and tortured by evil European captors, against whom the travelers themselves (in Hostel) or the traveler’s badass special forces type Dad (in Taken; young Maggie Grace apparently gets to fight some of her own fights against additional Euro-types in the sequel) have to fight in order to escape. While it’s possible to argue that the travelers in Roth’s film help bring on their own torture as a result of their chauvanistic attitudes toward European women (in the sequel Roth made his protagonists young women, and much more explicitly innocent ones at that), there’s no question that the true forces of evil in each film are distinctly European. Moreover, since all of the young travelers are explicitly constructed as tourists, hoping to experience the different world of Europe, the films can’t help but seem like cautionary tales about that world’s dangerous and destructive underbelly.

It’s that last point which I’d really want to emphasize here. After all, bad guys in both horror and action films can and do come from everywhere, and that doesn’t necessarily serve as a blanket indictment of those places; if anything, I would argue that the multi-national and multi-ethnic villainy of (for example) James Bond films is a thematic strength, making clear that evil can and will be found everywhere.  Yet both Hostel and Taken are precisely about, or at least originate with, the relationship between American travelers and Europeans, about the naïve ideals of cultural tourism and about creating plots that depend on very frightening and torturous realities within these foreign worlds. “Don’t travel to Europe, young people,” they seem to argue; and if you do, well, be prepared either to kill a ton of ugly Europeans (or have your Daddy do it) or to be killed by them. Not exactly the travel narrative I’d argue for!

Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more chance to add your responses and ideas!

Ben

PS. You know what to do!

8/10 Memory Day nominee: Anna Julia Cooper!

August 9, 2012: Cultural Turistas

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the fourth in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the two very different yet not necessarily dissimilar visions of Americans in Mexico in the same film.

As I wrote in this post on Edouard Glissant and the idea of creolization, the United States has a lot more in common with the Caribbean and the rest of the Western Hemisphere than we often acknowledge. Moreover, as I spent an entire week’s worth of posts trying to illustrate, the relationship between the United States and Mexico is even more interconnected. Yet despite those parallel and interconnected histories and identities, and notwithstanding the basic fact of geographical proximity between the two nations, there’s no question of course that Mexico is its own place, a fundamentally different nation than the US—and thus that we can and must analyze how Americans travel to and engage with Mexico (in reality and in cultural representations) just as we would with any other place.

One of the most complex and interesting such cultural representations, of the last couple decades and of any moment, has to be John Sayles’ Men with Guns (1997). Sayles’ film was shot entirely on location in Mexico, using an all-Mexican cast who speak Mexican Spanish (with English subtitles) throughout the film, which makes the few scenes when two overtly American, English-speaking turistas show up that much more striking and significant. The two tourists, played to exaggerated perfection by Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, are as clichéd and stereotypical as (I would argue) the rest of the film’s characters are multi-layered and complex; but while that leads their scenes to have a certain heavy-handedness, it’s also clearly Sayles’ point in these moments. These minor characters are not only outsiders and intruders in the film’s setting and world—they have no ability to understand this place and no interest in doing so, and their cultural tourism is, in the context of the film’s dark and powerful main stories and themes, both utterly ridiculous and deeply insulting. That might not describe all Americans’ attitudes toward or relationships to our hemispheric neighbors, but it’s certainly (both Sayles and I would argue) a far too prevalent perspective.

Sayles’ film would seem to be precisely the opposite: a thoughtful, nuanced, culturally immersive engagement with Mexican culture and community and history and issues. I love Sayles and am a fan of the film (although it’s not at the top of my list of his works), so I would agree with that description. Yet on the other hand, can’t we also see Sayles here as a kind of intellectual and artistic version of the tourist couple? A cultural tourist who comes down to Mexico for a while, engages with the place while he’s there, and then returns to the United States, to tell his stories of what he found? The film is, after all, not entirely unlike a tourist’s slideshow; “What John Did on His Mexican Vacation.” At the very least, I think we have to acknowledge that both Sayles and the tourists exist on the same spectrum, of American experiences in and with Mexico—and while of course it would be far too reductive to argue that all points on that spectrum are identical, it would be just as wrong-headed to claim that they don’t have anything in common. Only by acknowledging that we’re all cultural tourists, after all, can we perhaps start to analyze our own perspective and figure out how we can at times get beyond it.

Next Americans abroad tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?

8/9 Memory Day nominee: Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Franco American engineer and architect who fought in the Revolution and created the plan for Washington, DC—just another compelling reason to thank the French!