Editorial Comment: The Melting Pot

America, the land of opportunity, the land of immigration, the melting pot. We Americans are almost all immigrants or descendants of immigrants. One might say that very little in America is American. In Tony Kushner's Angels in America the play begins with the argument that there really is no immigrant experience in America not because there are no immigrants here but because there is no place here, no America here. “The ones who crossed the ocean. how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. You do not live in America. No such place exists.” (Kushner, 1992, p. 10). It is an interesting argument which, of course, is totally valid and invalid at once.

The two papers in this section of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies look at the immigrant experience from the perspective of the recently departed, newly arrived, fresh off the boat (or, more likely, fresh off the plane). Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Aruna Bewtra, and Salman Akhtar in “The Celluloid Ganges” examine the Indian experience of separation from home and the search for new identity in a strange land (America or some other). To be uprooted from one's homeland and then dropped in some far-off place can lead to many possible outcomes. Indeed, there is no one consistent outcome. The only consistent point is the point of departure - separation. And so the authors describe some of the varied and multifaceted outcomes and then present an “annotated filmography - a listing of the cinema of the Indian diaspora.” The body of their paper is a list of the films and the film-makers that sought to make sense of the common, unsettling experience of leaving mother India, of leaving home.

Andrew Lagomasino, in his paper “The Super Super”, looks at another immigrant experience - that of the Latino coming to America as reflected in the film, “El Super.” Here, the issue is power, it's loss,