Immigrant Literature

ENGLISH 172M Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Is “immigrant literature” a useful category? In the American context, the category has facilitated an understanding of how the country’s social, political, and intellectual life has been refreshed and reshaped by immigrants. It has provided a challenge to the idea of American culture as primarily white, Anglo-Saxon, and self-contained. But the category has also been used to segregate American literature, suggesting that subcategories such as “Asian-American” or “Latinx” works of “immigrant fiction” speak primarily to the ethnic groups they represent and obscuring the fact that immigrant themes such as alienation, homelessness, and fractured identities have far broader import. This course explores the limits and usefulness of "immigrant literature," as a literary and market category, focusing on the literature of migration to the United States since 1965, when new laws ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and ushered in a new era where the majority of the country’s immigrants hail from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. We will focus on questions on form: how has this new migration challenged the literary conventions of older forms of immigrant literature? We will also explore the legal and historical context that has produced categories such as the "illegal alien," and how these categories have been reaffirmed and challenged by contemporary immigrant writers.