Another Kind of “road map”?: A Response to Helena Maragou’s "American Studies and Gender Issues in an International Classroom"

Abstract

I remember the first time, several years ago, that I an American woman, raised in a white, middle-class suburb on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio saw a world map that was not made in America. Something was desperately wrong with it. Where was Cleveland? The map was manufactured in Britain, and in the fairly central position where I thought Cleveland should be, I believe I saw Edinburgh. Cleveland was somewhere to the left – to the West – and the massive American continent that I was so used to seeing centered and whole was, fundamentally, cut in half and “marginalized,” in a most literal way, while the United Kingdom was smack in the middle, floating there in a glistening, always sunny sea.