Oscar and Lilian Handlin show us how the new voyagers in the
twentieth century--from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin
America--record their experiences in the United States. The
narratives of the non-Europeans, they find, clearly reflect the
circumstances of their composition, as well as the political
prejudices of their authors. These literary products have earned
far less attention than those of the English, French, Germans, and
Russians, and this volume proposes to redress the balance.
The earliest of the thirty-one travel accounts was written by
Rabindranath Tagore in 1924, and the most recent by V. S. Naipaul
in 1989. Many accounts are newly translated from Arabic, Persian,
Hebrew, and Spanish. Some authors are well known, but the less
famous are equally insightful. Some insights are weighty, many are
amusing. Octavio Paz, a sympathetic observer who admired his
country's neighbor, was uneasy that the most powerful country in
the world sustained "a global ideology...as outdated as the
doctrine of free enterprise, the steam boat, and other relics of
the nineteenth century." The Israeli journalist Hanoch Bartov
observed that "God conceived the car first, with man an
afterthought, created for the car's use (a Southern California
legend)." In coming to a truer understanding of the United States,
these writers noted the frightening repercussions of unsettled
lives, perceived class differentiation, contentions regarding the
status of women, the sense of national unity amid diversity, and
countless other issues of concern to those who try to find meaning
in the contemporary world.
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