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| 229 Afterword Continuums, Mobility, Places on the Train In 2005, the New York Times Magazine carried two personal narratives about segregation, one a memoir about South African apartheid in its food section, and the other, a memoir about riding the so-called women’s car on the subway in Cairo in its “Lives” section.1 The essays were not linked in any way other than their pointed address to an American audience and the fact that they appeared in the same issue on the same day. That they are thematically connected by a shared focus on social separation is no doubt a coincidence; moreover, they take opposing views on “segregation.” Consistent with post–Civil Rights liberalism, the author of the essay on food condemns the apartheid that was part of his childhood experience in South Africa. In contrast, the author of the personal narrative on gender-segregated public transportation in Egypt implicitly praises the virtues of privacy in a public conveyance, an “amenity” not available to American women. In their differing ethical resonances, their invocations of global cultures, and their near-contiguity, these two essays reveal why Americans might resist drawing analogies between forms of social division in the public sphere. In the first essay, “American Dreams,” food becomes the occasion to recall racial segregation in its global context; as the subtitle attests, “Food may be pleasurable, but in its essence it’s political.” Author Jon Robin Baitz queries, “How could a cool iceberg salad with Russian dressing served by an elderly waitress at the late, lamented Dolores’s Drive Inn on Wilshire Boulevard seem like a perfect refutation of apartheid? Easy. Because at Dolores’s, you didn’t have to be white like me to get fries and a Coke” (55). The white American ’s longing for home during his “exile” in a racially divided South Africa is represented as nostalgia for diner food in a multicultural Los Angeles. Baitz’s difference from white South Africans lies in his race liberalism, a political orientation that is intrinsic to claiming membership in the collective identity, “American” in the post-1954 moment (Wiegman 1999). 230 | Afterword In contrast, the following essay about a western woman’s experience in the Middle East is meant to make Americans sit up and question our premises about women’s liberation. In “The Comfort of Strangers,” as a Muslim American , G. Willow Wilson establishes her solidarity with Egyptian women on the metro. Subtitled, “In Cairo’s subway, a Western woman like me can find safe haven,” the essay tells the story of her fellow riders’ censure of a male teenager who innocently enters the gender-segregated car to hawk tissues. At the moment of the adolescent’s rebuke, Wilson notes, “I was grateful to be part of the floating world of the women’s car. In that small corner of a culture so different from my own, culture itself ceased to matter. For a few station stops I carried no baggage—no problematic nationality, no suspect political agenda. I was simply a woman among other women” (62). It is not merely a feeling of cultural transcendence in the shared position of “woman” that the author wants to highlight, it is another collective rebuke. American women might be surprised to find that they lack what the author feels is a fundamental right enjoyed by Middle Eastern women: the right to privacy, ironically, on a public conveyance. Proximity initiates my comparison; the essays are separated by only eight pages. Nevertheless, in the context of American culture, they are also separated by a moral gulf. South Africa’s example is meant to confirm what Americans already know about racial segregation; Baitz exudes self-conscious pride in national egalitarianism, however unevenly practiced. Cheap, fast American food is superior to the mushy, bland cuisine of the former European colonies because it is served regardless of race. In contrast, the Egyptian anecdote is meant to level American superiority by asking a presumably biased audience to consider a benefit of gender separation: the erasure of other divisions. The stories are essentially about national affiliation and its ability to comfort as well as divide. That they underline an ethical distinction between forms of social separation reveals the complication involved in drawing conceptual analogies of difference. One example is indefensible as a blatant instance of inequality, yet the other is worthy of consideration precisely on the basis of group rights, in this case, the right to “safety.” By and large, we get the gist of...

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