National Identity

Apologies for the rather self-indulgent posts this week - but here’s another. Hopefully you can bend it to something useful.

My new American passport arrived today. Yes, reader, I marr…., ahh, b**, I mean, yes, reader, I am neither one thing nor the other. Or am I?

Which is all a roundabout way of asking the question -‘What is my national/cultural identity’?

Well, national and cultural identity aren’t exactly the same thing.

The way I see it, through an accident of birth, I have two pieces of documentation which give me citizenship rights in two countries. As for cultural affiliations, well, I’ve only lived in the USA for a few years, as a very young kid. The rest of my life has been spent in the UK. When I go to the USA, I feel like a British visitor. So culturally, if you like, I’m a Brit. Then again, how important is nationality to my identity? I really don’t know about that one!

There must be lots more people - students and teachers - with a dual national background or who have parents who weren’t born in the UK. Which culture do they feel closer to, and why?