States of Strangeness and Wonder: A Great American Road Trip
I grew up in South Africa with a particular idea of what America was. What kind of a place, what kind of people. The U.S. for me—as for countless others living in far-flung places across the globe raised on a steady diet of American culture—was almost more familiar to me than my own country.
It was the place of my favorite books and TV shows and movies, my comic books and the woefully out-of-date Teen magazines my sister and I bought, cheap and in bulk, from the newsagents. South Africa didn’t get television until 1976, and it was largely primitive when I was a teenager. Mercifully, we had Beverly Hills 90210, shown on TV with the original voices dubbed in Afrikaans (Luke Perry was only lightly less of a heartthrob with an Afrikaans accent). The original English-language soundtrack was broadcast over the radio, and I would tune in religiously, ignoring the poor syncing, and reveling in this weekly dose of American high school students who looked like grown-ups and drove convertibles to class.
My idea of the U.S. was, in the ’80s and ’90s, predominantly white,
