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Luxury Liner Row, New York circa 1957
by Robert G. Lloyd (2017)

The New York Passenger Ship Terminal between West 46th and West 54th streets in Hell’s Kitchen served as the point of departure for more American exiles and expatriates than any other in American history.

This photograph of a painting by the eminent marine artist Robert G. Lloyd captures several of the great ocean liners of this golden age of transatlantic crossings. Depicted are the British Cunard Line’s Media, Caronia, Mauretania, and Queen Mary, the French Liberte, the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, the American SS America and SS United States, the Italian Saturnia, and the American SS Independence.

The Story Behind the White Handkerchief

The steamer trunks collect at the front door. A kind of forward progress for the departing. Upstairs a hand extends from a heavy heart into a dresser drawer and falls upon a white handkerchief. At the terminal, the handkerchief dances between the faces of the leaving and the left. It presses the corner of liquid eyes, caresses tightened cheeks before moving to the water’s edge to join a symphony of lament and longing. A chorus of movement and light against the fading landscape of native soil.

It returns home tear, scent, and prayer laden…as an artifact of a long goodbye.

– Anonymous

The waving of a white handkerchief has long been associated with saying goodbye and wishing the departing well.

Understanding Americans Abroad

The Center for the Study of American Exile & Expatriation (CSAEE) is an independent, unaffiliated, nonprofit, nonpartisan, scholarly research center dedicated to the study of Americans who throughout history have made their lives abroad. CSAEE provides focused research and support for scholars engaged in the study of Americans outside of the United States. CSAEE also serves as a global point of coordination for a network of universities and public-facing institutions.

Early America: Independence To The Civil War

From the settlements of Jamestown and Massachusetts to the writings of the founding fathers to the musings of Hector Saint Jean de Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), there emerged the idea of American identity separate from Great Britain and the European continent.

Age of American Industry, Empire, & Impressionism

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, some ten to fifteen thousand former Confederates and other southerners fled the United States. Most feared retribution by the United States government, while others resented American reconstructionist policies. Many desired to reestablish slaved-based plantation economies in parts of Mexico and Central and South America, namely in British Honduras (modern day Belize) and Brazil.

In the Shadows of a World at War

The period from the outbreak of World War I (1914) through the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) to allied victories over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II (1945) is best understood as a single protracted global war.

The Cold War

Against the backdrop of the competition between the United States, the Soviet Union, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the People’s Republic of China for the “soul of mankind,” Americans of various backgrounds sought either direct involvement, abstention, or refuge from its wake.

Contemporary American Exiles and Expatriates

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 ushered in an era of globalization and expansive systems of international manufacturing and trade. This phenomenon, coupled with the rise of the digital and information economy, led to unprecedented levels of migration from the United States as new generations of Americans, free from the confines of offices and national boundaries, sought their fortunes abroad.

James Baldwin as Flâneur

James Arthur Baldwin (1924 – 1987) arrived in Paris, France in 1948 and lived there until 1957.

The non-fiction essays of James Baldwin are enjoying renewed interest against the backdrop of our contentious and polarized times. Social movements of various stripes have found resonance and prescience in works such as The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972).

For our inaugural Spotlight History, we explore the idea of James Baldwin as a flâneur through the lens of his expatriate novel, Giovanni’s Room (1957).

Nancy L. Green

The term “expatriate” has been extended backward to refer to Edith Wharton in the early twentieth century and beyond World War II to James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Encompassing everyone from the Henrys—James and Miller—to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, from White Bostonians and New Yorkers to Black Harlemites, from those escaping sexual and social convention to those fleeing prejudice and discrimination, expatriate writers, artists, and musicians have become a romanticized icon, haunting Parisian cafés where Hemingway’s Moveable Feast can still be seen, clutched by earnest would-be Ernests. – Nancy L. Green, Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept (2009)

The terms at the heart of CSAEE’s project – exile and expatriation – are elastic, inexact, and fortunately for our purposes, accommodating. Of the artists, writers, and scholars who have endeavored to take on the challenge of unpacking the nomenclature of American leave-taking, few have done so with as much devotion, care, and precision as our inaugural Featured Scholar, Professor Nancy L. Green.

Luxury Liner Row, New York circa 1957
by Robert G. Lloyd (2017)