Abstract
In 1984, when I turned 30, I still did not really understand what it meant to identify with a place or a people. Perhaps this was because I had called a number of places ‘home’ by that time. I was born in Michigan, ‘got tall’ in Southern California, attended high school in New Orleans, college in Houston, and graduate school back in New Orleans. Michigan was much clearer on my birth certificate than in my memory, but the other places I had come to know well, and even felt affection for Southern California and, especially, for New Orleans. Given my love of fine food, drink-in-hand conversations, river sounds and rocking-chair porch life, New Orleans was undoubtedly the most suitable place of the three for me. But I never identified with the city in the sense of feeling as if I were from or rooted there. In fact, when asked where I was from, I mostly fidgeted, trying to find a simple way of saying that I didn’t know. My fidgets and feelings of rootlessness continued until the autumn of 1984 when I left the United States for the first time. Only then did an identity with respect to place begin to come clear in my mind.
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Notes
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© 2001 Marjorie Morgan
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Morgan, M. (2001). Introduction. In: National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512153_1
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