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In 1991, Anton Shammas wrote of a Palestinian immigrant who had come to the United States, secretly carrying with him plants, seeds, and seven birds native to the West Bank: "Maybe that's why Abu-Khalil can feel at home in California, surrounded by the artifacts of his lost Palestine. This country is big; it has enough room not only for the newcomers but also for their portable homelands. Among other achievements, Amerka [sic] has made homesickness obsolete" (300). Shammas suggested that as a result of America's space and immigrants' ability to import the things of home to the United States, there need be no more pain at parting, no more longing for a lost home. Is this true? If one can have in America the food, the clothes, the newspapers (if not always the birds and the plants) of one's native land, does distance no longer matter? Has homesickness become an outdated and unnecessary emotion?
The answer is complex. As cross-country and international travel has become faster, more comfortable, and more affordable, leaving home has come to be seen as a less consequential act, because it appears easier to return. The same transportation technologies that make it possible for people to leave and return home also make it possible to transport some of the tastes and sounds of home to a new location. Modern, global consumer society holds out the promise that returning home is easy, and that reconstructing home in a new locale is even easier. While the home one has left may be far away, the consumer economy provides the illusion that it is relatively close at hand. In such a context, homesickness may seem to some to be an emotional artifact of the past, inappropriate in a contemporary society that takes for granted the necessity of mobility. Those who suffer from homesickness, however, know all too clearly that even with such conveniences, distances between an old home and a new one are sometimes great, and often unbridgeable.
This article examines the history of homesickness and how consumer society has reshaped the emotion. The commercialization of travel has allowed for easier migration, which often has resulted in homesickness. On the other hand, the market economy gradually has been able to offer to immigrants a...
