Berkley Center

“Elizabeth, could you tell us about your understanding of the cultural context of this?”

The professor of my "Transatlantic Rhetoric" class asks me this at least once in every seminar, usually more often. As the only American student in the course, he frequently calls on “[my] transatlantic experience,” after which I usually stumble through something that hopefully resembles an answer in my unmistakably American accent.

When I enrolled in this English course here at the University of Sussex, I was expecting that my experience as an American Studies major—born, raised, and educated in America—would make my perspective different from that of my British classmates. However, I was naive in thinking that this would not be significant. I had decided that I could approach the course impersonally, and thought that detaching my own, decidedly American, frame of reference on American and British history would be relatively simple.

After three weeks of this course, however, I am still coming to terms with the extent to which my own experiences limit my understanding, and with being able to think outside of these narrow boundaries. For each class meeting, we read two speeches, one from each side of the Atlantic, with the intention of comparing the style, tone, and effectiveness of each. As the only international student in the class, which is fairly rare at a school with such a large international population, I have found that blending in and sliding under the radar in this context is much harder than anticipated. My “otherness” here in Brighton is generally fairly invisible—until I speak, I can quite easily pass for any other British student. In class, however, when my professor regularly calls on me to ask for my “understanding of the cultural context” of our American texts, it becomes much more obvious.

This manifests itself first in the general feeling of discomfort when all eyes are on me as I try to recall anything I can remember about Patrick Henry, for example, but more strikingly in the recognition of how deep my own “Americanization” runs. When asked to analyze the effectiveness of the Declaration of Independence, my instincts come from years of American history and government classes, which, especially in middle and high school, held up this foundational document as a symbol of everything American: freedom, enlightenment, progress, et cetera. My British classmates, however, seem to be able to evaluate texts far more objectively. They can consider the rhetoric without the emotional and historical boundaries that I have absorbed, changing their perspectives entirely. Not only are their associations with the texts different from mine—for example, none of them have seen ad campaigns that quote “Give me liberty or give me death,” or heard politicians quote the Declaration of Independence’s “unalienable rights”—but their understanding of our shared history seems much more rational, and less emotional, than my own.

This isn’t intended to be an indictment of the American education system, so much as a process of coming to terms with the limits of my own narratives and a recognition of the need to transcend them. While I chose to go abroad to learn about British culture, especially given how deeply immersed I am in American Studies and culture at home, I’m finding that reconsidering my own assumptions and my understanding of American culture and history is going to be equally valuable. I’m becoming more comfortable with sharing my own insights—such as the explanation that the Declaration of Independence is not necessarily read aloud at public events nearly as frequently as people seemed to think—but I hope that I can gain from my classmates a more layered and multi-dimensional perspective to study from.