Ralph Ellison "In a Strange Country"

First, general background information about the United States in the 1940s, when this was written. Here is a wonderful online project from the Library of Congress, called African American Odyssey, that has lots of information and illustrations. For more on Ellison, see the New York Times Ellison page (registration required but it's free).

Some thoughts on the story "In a Strange Country" for our next class. How does the story describe Wales and being Welsh, through the eyes of the American soldier Parker? What does being "American" mean to him and to the different characters in the story and why? What does the ending of the story mean? How do you interpret the story's title?

When people travel, they carry with them their own ways of understanding the world and social relationships. Even when Parker goes to Wales, he and the other American soldiers are, in a way, still in a kind of "American" place, in that they bring with them the dominant American social, particularly racial, values of their time, the 1940s. On the other hand, people are constantly in the process of changing or developing their sense of identity in relation to others; how do you see that happening with Parker?

The geographer Doreen Massey writes that "one way of thinking about place is as particular moments in ... intersecting social relations, nets of which have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into the wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too" (Space, Place and Gender 120). How does this definition of "place" connect to the story?

UPDATE: The song in the story is "The Star-Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States. You can read the lyrics here; usually only the first verse is sung.