The American Question

[optimutt]

What do you think of when you think of “America”? Do you think of an afternoon walk on Cape Cod? Do you think of how shoddy that last pitch was and how could your team give it up again? Do you think of a quiet afternoon in a coffee house, sipping a tasty hot beverage? Or do you think of endless plains interrupted only sporadically by the random

Comments

[sevarem]

I took an African-American literature class with one of my linguistics professors. Naturally we all thought that African-American meant we would be reading about people from the US. We did, but he threw in books about people from the Caribbean and South America, because those authors are also African-American.

He wouldn't let us use the term "American" or "America" to describe anyone from the US for the same reasons you've outlined above. And though I had thought about the subject before, discussing it in a class setting got me to think even more about it. Anyway, I've drawn about the same conclusion. What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be from America? Can my Canadian friend call herself American? How about my Costa Rican friend? It's an interesting conundrum.

I don't have an answer though, but I'm open to discussion.

[anonymous]

Perhaps citizens of the USA are called Americans because the nation's name is United States of America. I believe ours is the only nation in this hemisphere that includes the word 'America'. Not arrogance, just fact