October 7, 2016: AmericanStudying The Americans: Immigrant Generations

[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 2^nd-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?

October 6, 2016: AmericanStudying The Americans: Afghanistan

[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!]

How four kinds of cultural texts can help us understand the impossibly complicated, vital 20^th and 21^st century histories of the US and/in Afghanistan.

1)      80s Action Films: As I highlighted at length in that post, both James Bond and John Rambo found themselves in one of their respective 1980s exploits fighting alongside the Mujahideen (and against the Russians) in Afghanistan. Besides inducing squirms in American audiences when we realize that Bin Laden and company might as well as have been the friendly and brave Afghan allies with whom Bond and Rambo serve, those elements of these films help remind us of both the shifting realities of war and, most importantly, of our undeniable presence and influence in even the communities and histories that feel most opposed to our own national ones.

2)      The Americans: In many ways the Afghanistan plotline in the show, which took center stage in season 3, offers precisely the opposite lesson: a reminder of what both the war and the US/Mujahideen relationship looked like from the Soviet perspective. When we meet a particular Mujahideen leader whom Elizabeth and Philip Jennings turn to their own advantage, he’s a violent extremist, one perfectly willing to turn on his “allies” if he believes they’re not as pure as he. Yet the show’s depiction of the war isn’t just about this alternative narrative of the Afghan resistance—we also learn (SPOILERS) that Philip has a son serving in the Soviet military there, giving the war a very different, human link to this American character and family.

3)      The Siege: I said most of what I want to say about Ed Zwick’s uncannily prescient 1998 film in that post. Here I’ll just reiterate that by making the film’s terrorist villains an Afghani group who had been trained, funded, and then abandoned by Annette Bening’s CIA agent (and the agency as a whole)—yet a group who remain explicitly villainous—Zwick and company succeed at complicating and enriching the conversation about Islamic terrorism and the Afghan histories to which it connects far more fully than do most depictions in American media (or politics).

4)      Afghan American authors: No conversation about the US and Afghanistan would be anywhere near complete without engagement with how Afghan American authors and artists represent those histories and issues. One such author, Khaled Hosseini, has become of the most popular and prominent 21^st century novelists, which is of course a good thing but also could be a limiting one if he became the solo representative of a broad and diverse community of figures and voices. So the more we can also read Tamim Ansary’s West of Kabul, East of New York, and Qais Akbar Omar’s A Fort Of Nine Towers, and all the writers collected in the anthology One Story, Thirty Stories, among many others, the more we can make sure this conversation is as multi-vocal as it needs to be.

Last AmericansStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other AmericanStudies shows you’d highlight?

October 5, 2016: AmericanStudying The Americans: Stealth

[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!]

On the historical limitations and imaginative possibilities of a secretive technology.

Russian spies Elizabeth and Philip Jennings have pursued missions relating to a number of 1980s political and international issues in the course of the show’s (to date) four seasons, including Nicaraguan Contras and (tomorrow’s topic) the war in Afghanistan. But perhaps the most recurring and consistent mission has been their investigation into and attempt to both derail and steal the US military’s development of stealth technology. That artistic choice makes a lot of sense, as stealth is a perfect metaphor for the show’s vision of secret spies—not only because the technology was literally intended to produce invisible instruments of surveillance and warfare, but also because (as Elizabeth and Philip’s missions and contacts reveal again and again) the quest to develop that technology took place in a clandestine, shadowy world that it might be difficult for our internet age to imagine but that comprises a significant percentage of the show’s plotlines and situations. If the name hadn’t already been taken by a much less interesting action film (on which more in a moment), Stealth could have been a less evocative but still accurate back-up name for The Americans as well.

There’s one more level to the resonances between the TV show and those technological histories, though: stealth technology appeared to be one thing (a vital new weapon toward which the superpowers were racing in a new arms race; a narrative that, as that hyperlinked article illustrates, continues to exist) and turned out to be something very different (a hugely expensive and largely failed—or at least only partially successful—experiment). The US spent billions of dollars in the course of the 1980s (and before) to develop a stealth jet, and yet as this list reflects more such projects were cancelled then were ever brought to fruition. Moreover, even those fighters that were completed have still been found (as the article hyperlinked above under “largely failed…” indicates) to be visible to radar, the opposite of which is of course the entire purpose of developing a new stealth vehicle. The military has used stealth bombers successfully in some military campaigns, most notably the 1989 conflict with Panama and its dictator Manuel Noriega. Yet to say that the technology did not turn out to be the game-changing weapon (in or after the Cold War) about which the spies in The Americans are so worried would be to understate the case.

The show isn’t a documentary, though, and it’s also far from the only cultural text to appreciate and utilize the imaginative possibilities of stealth technology. There’s the aforementioned action film, for example, which links stealth to fears over artificial intelligence to pose the question of what would happen if an “inhuman and invincible” stealth bomber started thinking and acting for itself. There’s John Woo’s first Hollywood movie Broken Arrow, in which terrorists led by John Travolta take advantage of stealth technology to help them steal nuclear weapons from the US military (until Christian Slater and a national park ranger foil their plan, natch). And, to take things a bit further afield (literally and figuratively), there’s the recurring science fiction trope (and semi-scientific technology) of “cloaking devices,” stealth technologies for spaceships that have played significant roles in Star Trek, Star Wars, and a number of other fictional universes and futures. Judging by these and other cultural texts, we both fears and are attracted to the possibilities offered by stealth technology, and by the ability to move through the world—even in our most powerful vehicles—unseen.

Next AmericansStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other AmericanStudies shows you’d highlight?