“Where are you from?” people ask — innocently, not understanding that my answer is likely to exceed the limits of their time and their patience. I can offer two replies. The first is long and complicated, and involves a list of place names (Seattle, Ohio, Pittsburgh, North Dakota) so multivariate that it defies the kind of cohesion that the person asking the question probably wants. The second is shorter but no less complex: I’m an academic, and, as such, I’ve lived in a lot of places but am not quite from any of them.
The condition of the modern academic is, at least for many of us, characterized by transience, flexibility, and a resulting measure of ambivalence. It’s a state that brings to mind Henry James’s definition of cosmopolitanism: “that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.”
Take my current cohort of first-year faculty colleagues. Faculty Friend A is a native-born Iowan who attended college in Iowa, moved to Michigan for her first job, switched careers and spent time in California, then entered a Ph.D. program in Arizona before ending up in North Dakota. Faculty Friend B spent his graduate career in Nashville and speaks with a slight, not uncharming Southern drawl — this in spite of the fact that he spent a decade in New York City and is originally from Utah. Faculty Friend C adds the challenges of citizenship to our collective riddles of space, place, and identity, having emigrated first from Iran to Canada for his education and then from Canada to the United States for his first faculty position.
The four of us, were we to put together a collective CV, would very likely have half of the United States covered. Combined with the rest of our colleagues in our university’s first-year faculty-mentoring program, we could add another 15 to 20 nations to our roster.
A year ago, I would have viewed all this collective displacement as decidedly negative. I would have registered the “discomfort” of James’s comment more keenly than the feeling of advantage to which it alludes. And I would have had personal reasons for doing so.
I spent almost a decade of my life in Pittsburgh, thanks to the Ph.D. I elected to pursue there. I met my husband in Pittsburgh; I had two bands in Pittsburgh; to this day, most of my friends still live in Pittsburgh. In an interview I gave with a local arts blog in 2012, I am quoted describing Pittsburgh as “the city that taught me how to be the person I wanted to be.” That is, to a great extent, still true, even though I was not from Pittsburgh originally and cannot lay claim to the kind of “from-ness” that many of my friends there can.
Saying you are from somewhere communicates a kind of certainty and coziness, but it may also reveal limitations. In my first few weeks in North Dakota, I observed how my new colleagues and I often stumbled through negotiations of saying where we were from. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, a lot of added explanation and, every now and then, the thrill that comes from realizing that someone else cheers for the same sports team and knows the same street names as you, even if it’s been a decade or more since he or she last navigated them. But the sorrow, too, was often poignantly evident. My peers, too, had left family and friends behind, substituting sports paraphernalia for the feelings of connection that they may have previously taken for granted.
Back in the 1990s, critics debated what they saw as the political stakes surrounding nascent feelings of cosmopolitanism in the American academy. The literary scholar Bruce Robbins explains that, for the academy’s critics, “the word ‘cosmopolitan’ immediately evokes the image of a privileged person: someone who can claim to be a ‘citizen of the world’ by virtue of independent means, high-tech tastes, and globe-trotting mobility.”
The Right had, according to Robbins, in his 1992 essay “Comparative Cosmopolitanism,” gone on the defensive in light of these notions of “privilege,” seeing American intellectuals as a “‘special-interest group’ representing nothing but themselves.”
If the list of countries, states, and cities that characterize my faculty cohort is any indication, privilege is still part of the scenario, but not in the sense demonized by the Right. We are not a special-interest group but, rather, have the privilege of an unspecialized, universally informed outlook.
Several advantages come with an academic’s itinerant life. The most compelling is a kind of compulsive cultural literacy. After you have lived anywhere for a while, it is easy to imagine that the conditions of space and place that you experience on a daily basis are par for the course. Complacency calls; you forget what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land. When I was 18 and relocating from Seattle to attend college in Ohio, I recall greeting the experience of difference with derision. I believed that everything I had ever experienced was better than everything I was now experiencing.
Today, though, I am learning to reckon with an understanding of privilege; I now see myself as lucky to be living in this, my fifth state of residence, and lucky to be from nowhere in particular, gifted with the potential to sympathize with the experience of being from anywhere.
Granted, the experiences of academics can be fraught. Humanities Ph.D.s, facing a depleted job market, will be hard-pressed to view forced relocation as a good thing. In a better world, some might argue, we’d be raised, educated, and later employed in a single community, encouraged to develop loyalty to that community. Except that homogeneity and stasis tend to breed myopia, while flexibility and variation present, at the very least, opportunities for understanding.
As academics we are required to reckon with the discomforts of dislocation. This can and should be viewed as a good thing. For we are not the only ones who struggle with the question “Where are you from?” — increasingly, our students, too, are contending with that question. Pittsburgh may have taught me how to be the person I wanted to be. But North Dakota is now teaching me how to be the person I need to be in order to craft, along with my students, a vision of America that is as imperatively foreign as it is functionally familiar.
Sheila Liming is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota.
