America served as imaginative escape and modernity, not destination, for Caribbean intellectuals.

Evidence

America was the site of imaginative escape for me when I was in Kingston, although I didn’t go there. I came to England because the lines of connection were still to the mother country. Now all the intellectuals from the Caribbean go and are teaching and writing in the US. But although my connection was to the UK, my imaginative escape was cinema—I went to films every Monday or every Saturday throughout my teenage life, and a very rich period it was. Bogart, Bette Davis, film noir, melodrama—incredible cinema, American cinema, and of course American music and jazz. And then once one came to England, America continued to stand as that which is modern, which is not weighed down by the English social class system. It’s a source of that ambivalence, the ambivalence one feels about America, though I feel very distant from it now: I can’t stand it at the moment, I wouldn’t go there, I don’t go there. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1076

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the ambivalent positioning of the US in postcolonial/Islamophobia discourse as both liberation site and imperial power.