On unrootedness

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/weekinreview/24powe.html?pagewanted=1&ref=weekinreview


“Unrootedness is, and always has been, part and parcel of being American,” Arnold Rampersad, a professor at Stanford University and biographer of Ralph Ellison and Hughes, said in an e-mail message. “It is the flip side of perhaps the defining aspect of Americanness, the capacity of its citizens to reinvent themselves.”