I believe that the author's intent in “Stranger in a Village” is to illustrate the cultural gap between America and the rest of the “white” world. This is described perhaps most vividly in the 14th paragraph, where he says that there is an abyss that divides the people of the village and the people back at home, and that abyss is “the American experience” (I assume that he is referring the to civil war, and the history of segregation).
“There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.”
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Hmm. Good restating of Baldwin's passage, but it seems like you could take this a little bit further. I don't think he just means that America is segregated as a result of historical occurrences; I think he is also speaking, metaphysically, of the act of existing as a black man in the US, and the act of existing as a black man in a foreign context where the notion of being black hasn't yet been explored. Terms are loaded in America, and not just with historical implications, but with the unspoken: with the unclear conceptions that people have of one another. Does that make sense?
...very interesting..I have never thought of it this way. A cultural gap between America and the rest of the white world..
Many people, especially in Taiwan, treat America as the white culture. The first guess they would make if you were white would be American or ABC etc...America does not represent the whole white culture though...
good luck on Scholars cup man...and I think I might do it actually...I dunno...
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