The challenges of inside out

Right now I'm trying to talk about Americana with my freshmen students and getting them to try to step outside of their own country to take a look at it from another perspective. I suppose subjecting them to Jean Baudrillard's "Utopia Achieved" chapter from America might be a difficult way to do that, but with the requirements for the course, it's one of the few options that I can use to do so.

I'm discovering in part, that some of it is really hard for the usual reasons, that it's hard to see your own country for what it is, but also because many of my students know so little about their own country.

We were talking about American icons and symbols today (they watched Pulp Fiction last week, which at least gave us a starting point) and it struck me that although they're finding the Baudrillard reading difficult, an outsider's view is what it just might take to get them stretching themselves ouside their comfort zones to critically look at these icons. I've been trying to convey to them the use of the outsider's view for getting you to look beyond your assumptions, but some of them aren't buying it.

Speaking of the outsider's point of view, I ran across an interview with Neil Gaiman (and Susannah Clarke) in which he talks about how he came up with some of the ideas for American Gods, and I think he summarized the experience well.

For me, my previous adult novel, "American Gods," was very much about what happens when you're English and you come to stay in a country that you've seen in movies and on TV and think you know everything about, and suddenly you're noticing these odd little bits that nobody else notices because they grew up with it. And you think it's weird....The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story.

I know for myself, even coming from a country whose popular culture is often indistinguishable from that of the U.S., that there have been times when I've been surprised by little differences, and other times when I've said something, or made reference to something that I thought was a common cultural reference, only to find out that people here don't know what I'm talking about.

Of course, most of my cultural references mean nothing to my students since I'm almost a generation older than they are, but I still think they can only begin to understand the Baudrillard essay by stepping out of their own comfortable space in order to engage with it in a way that doesn't take umbrage at the things he says in the essay. There is one student in the class who was born elsewhere, and the majority have travelled outside of the U.S., so I have hope that it will be possible to get them out of the headspace in which they simply assume that their way of life is universal, but it's just very difficult.

It will be interesting to see whether they manage to accomplish this when I get their drafts next week.