Rejection And Disaffiliation In Twenty First Century American Immigration Narratives

Rejection and Disaffiliation in Twenty-First Century American Immigration Narratives examines changing attitudes about national sovereignty and affiliation. Katie Daily delinks twenty-first century American immigration narratives from 9/11, examining genre alterations within a scope of literary analysis that is wider than what “post-9/11” allows. What emerges is an understanding of the speed at which the rhetoric and aims of many twenty-first century immigration narratives significantly depart from the traditions established post-1900. Daily investigates a recent trend in which novelists and filmmakers question what it means to be an immigrant in contemporary America and explores how these “disaffiliation” narratives challenge some of the most fundamental traditions in American literature and society.

Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story explores the intersection between immigration and pedagogy via the narrative form. Embedded in the contexts of both student writing and student reading of literature chapters by scholars from four-year and two-year colleges and universities across the country, this book engages the topic of immigration within writing and literature courses as the site for extending, critiquing, and challenging assumptions about justice and equity while deepening students’ sense of ethics and humanity. Each of the chapters recognizes the prevalence of immigrant students in writing classrooms across the United States—including foreign-born, first- and second-generation Americans, and more—and the myriad opportunities and challenges those students present to their instructors. These contributors have seen the validity in the stories and experiences these students bring to the classroom—evidence of their lifetimes of complex learning in both academic and nonacademic settings. Like thousands of college-level instructors in the United States, they have immigrant stories of their own. The immigrant “narrative” offers a unique framework for knowledge production in which students and teachers may learn from each other, in which the ordinary power dynamic of teacher and students begins to shift, to enable empathy to emerge and to provide space for an authentic kind of pedagogy. By engaging writing and literature teachers within and outside the classroom, Teaching Writing through the Immigrant Story speaks to the immigrant narrative as a viable frame for teaching writing—an opportunity for building and articulating knowledge through academic discourse. The book creates a platform for immigration as a writing and literary theme, a framework for critical thinking, and a foundation for significant social change and advocacy. Contributors: Tuli Chatterji, Katie Daily, Libby Garland, Silvia Giagnoni, Sibylle Gruber, John Havard, Timothy Henderson, Brennan Herring, Lilian Mina, Rachel Pate, Emily Schnee, Elizabeth Stone

The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel investigates the role of genre in the contemporary novel: taking its departure from the observation that numerous contemporary novelists make use of popular genre influences in what are still widely considered to be literary novels, it sketches the uses, the work, and the value of genre. It suggests the value of a critical look at texts’ genre use for an analysis of the contemporary moment. From this, it develops a broader perspective, suggesting the value of genre criticism and taking into view traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the metafictional novel as well as the kinds of amalgamated forms which have recently come to prominence. In essays discussing a wide range of authors from Steven Hall to Bret Easton Ellis to Colson Whitehead, the contributors to the volume develop their own readings of genre’s work and valence in the contemporary novel.

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries. Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over. Glenda R. Carpio argues that we need a new paradigm for migrant fiction. Migrant Aesthetics shows how contemporary authors—Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, and Junot Díaz—expose the historical legacies and political injustices that produce forced migration through artistic innovation. Their fiction rejects the generic features of immigrant literature—especially the acculturation plot and the use of migrant narrators as cultural guides who must appeal to readerly empathy. They emphasize the limits of empathy, insisting instead that readers recognize their own roles in the realities of migration, which, like climate change, is driven by global inequalities. Carpio traces how these authors create literary echoes of the past, showing how the history of (neo)colonialism links distinct immigrant experiences and can lay the foundation for cross-ethnic migrant solidarity. Revealing how migration shapes and is shaped by language and narrative, Migrant Aesthetics casts fiction as vital testimony to past and present colonial, imperial, and structural displacement and violence.

Explores public opinion about being and becoming American, and its implications for contemporary immigration debates.

This volume presents both an analysis of how identities are built, represented and negotiated in narrative, as well as a theoretical reflection on the links between narrative discourse and identity construction. The data for the book are Mexican immigrants' personal experience narratives and chronicles of their border crossings into the United States. Embracing a view of identity as a construct firmly grounded in discourse and interaction, the author examines and illustrates the multiple threads that connect the local expression and negotiation of identity to the wider social contexts that frame the experience of migration, from material conditions of life in the United States to mainstream discourses about race and color. The analysis reveals how identities emerge in discourse through the interplay of different levels of expression, from implicit adherence to narrative styles and ways of telling, to explicit negotiation of membership categories.

This guide offers theoretical and practical tools for an innovative approach to a key political issue: how, along with our immigrant fellow-citizens, can we build a fair and plural society that ensures the well-being or all? By moving beyond rigid categories like "foreigner", "immigrant" and "illegal, and ambiguous concepts like "identity", "diversity, "immigration control and "integration", this guide suggests that policy makers, civil servants and citizens need to question their own vocabulary if they are to grasp the complexity and uniqueness or people's migration paths. Perceiving migrants simply from the host country's point or view - the security, well-being and life-style of its nationals - has limitations. We cannot see people of foreign origin only as a threat or a resource to be exploited. If we see them as stereotypes, we are seeing only a mirror of European fears and contradictory aspirations. This guide helps readers decode and address the structural problems of our society, looking at the accusations made against migrants And The utilitarian view or the advantages that immigrants bring to host societies. In publishing this guide, The Council or Europe is seeking to initiate an in-depth debate on the migration issue, which is so high on the European political agenda

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Citizenship is always in dispute – in practice as well as in theory – but conventional perspectives do not address why the concept of citizenship is so contentious. This unique book presents a new perspective on citizenship by treating it as a continuing focus of dispute.The authors dispute the way citizenship is normally conceived and analysed within the social sciences, developing a view of citizenship as always emerging from struggle. This view is advanced through an exploration of the entanglements of politics, culture and power that are both embodied and contested in forms and practices of citizenship. This compelling view of citizenship emerges from the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of the four authors, drawing on the diverse disputes over citizenship in their countries of origin (Brazil, France, the UK and the US). The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the field of citizenship, no matter what their geographical, political or academic location.