Still glancing back ..
I have been thinking a lot about diasporas lately. What it means to live long term in a society outside the one you were raised in.
Note: This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Alte Frau, New Life, my weekly newsletter about life in Berlin. I don't often cross-post here, but I am including it because it's like a 'Part 2' of Still American, the post I wrote explaining my love for the country I left.
"I have been thinking a lot about diasporas lately.
What it means to live long term in a society outside the one you were raised in.
We’ve only lived in Berlin two years, so I don’t consider us part of an American diaspora. I feel like that comes later - when you have been a part of an expatriate community for a generation or more.
But it has been on my mind as we prepare to vote absentee in this particularly fraught U.S. presidential election.
What does it mean to be an American who doesn’t live in America?
U.S. law requires me to pay income taxes as long as I remain a citizen. It allows me to vote in all federal and some state elections. But what role should overseas Americans have in shaping the public life and laws of a country they no longer live in and may have no plans to return to?
It’s something I think about often.
When most Americans think of diaspora communities, they think of distinct groups of people who have come to the United States to live permanently. The U.S. is overwhelmingly a country of immigrants, with fewer than two percent of the population having any verifiable Native American ancestry.
Our modern nation is comprised of a series of successive communities of immigrants who moved there - multiple diasporas. The U.S. remains a country that sees far more immigration than emigration - more people moving in each year than moving away.
But there is also a U.S. American diaspora - groups of citizens who live, either permanently or for many years - outside the country.
“Immigration, settlement, and assimilation are central themes in the American narrative,” writes Sheila Croucher, a professor of American Studies at Miami University, in her 2012 journal article, Americans Abroad: A Global Diaspora?. “But equally prevalent in the country’s history, albeit less celebrated, are [themes of] emigration, mobility, and the maintenance of transnational ties.”
When George Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, among those celebrating were a “colony” of Americans living in France, she notes. And the “trend of Americans emigrating for a mix of political, cultural, and, increasingly, economic reasons” continued through different periods in U.S. history up to the present day."
Read the rest here:
Cathi Harris
In other news ...
A piece I wrote for Medium about Barcelona's move to ban short-term rentals (a.k.a. 'AirBnBs) was picked up by Evropa, a new publication about "everything European." I look forward to reading and contributing more stories there about the culture, politics, news, and life in Europe.
