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Table of Contents

Critical Insights: Immigrant Experience, The

About This Volume

by Maryse Jayasuriya

The essays in this volume draw upon a vast range of immigrant experiences, precisely because immigrant writing in the United States and beyond brings together people of various nationalities, cultures, languages, immigration statuses, and social and economic classes. These essays also consider a wide array of genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and even hybrid forms, like graphic novels. The book begins with a broad overview of the field of immigrant writing by Maryse Jayasuriya, including a substantial survey of immigrant writing that extends the works discussed in the individual essays.

Critical Contexts

The critical contexts section begins with Ezra Cappell’s sweeping survey of Jewish American immigrant writing, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States is one of the defining models for the immigrant experience in the United States. Cappell argues that immigration has been a major theme in early twentieth-century Jewish American literature and has continued to influence late twentieth-century and contemporary Jewish American literature as well.

Umme Al-wazedi considers South Asian immigrant writing through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist criticism and theory, showing that South Asian women writers, as well as their characters, have to negotiate their hybrid and multiple identities in the new world in which they find themselves. Al-wazedi analyzes how these writers focus on issues of belonging and forming or transforming identity through fiction, collages of memory, and critical essays.

Asha Jeffers highlights the range of critical responses to one central work of immigrant fiction, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao even as she advances her own understanding of this very important novel. Jeffers considers the nature and role of myth in the novel, arguing that the different kinds of myths featured, including comic books and science fiction—which she calls “myths of the future”—frame the lives of the second-generation immigrant characters.

Cynthia Leenerts compares two important immigrant graphic memoirs: GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, both of which delineate family and national narratives. Based on how these two memoirs depict the immigrant experience in the United States as well as the reasons for emigration from Vietnam and the hold the homeland continues to have on the narrator/artists and their respective families, Leenerts argues that the process of anamnesis—of recovering and reconstituting memory, which is crucial both to finding one’s identity and to discovering and speaking one’s unique and compelling voice—is central to both narratives.

Critical Readings

The immigrant experience can provide inspiration for non-immigrant writers as well as immigrant writers, and some of the most eloquent texts on the immigrant experience in the United States were written by a fourth-generation Jewish American poet, Emma Lazarus, who came to identify powerfully with both her Sephardic and German Jewish immigrant ancestors and her Russian Jewish immigrant contemporaries. Brian Yothers considers how Lazarus’s poetry came to speak so powerfully for impoverished immigrants despite her own relatively elite status in “Emma Lazarus’s Poetic Representations of the Immigrant Experience.”

Writings about the immigrant experience can be very inventive, idiosyncratic, and even hybrid in form. Robert C. Evans explores an early example of such writing by the Asian American author Edith Eaton (also known as Sui Sin Far)—a series of articles published in the Los Angeles Express newspaper over a five-month period in 1904, which purportedly recounted a cross-continental trip narrated in the voice of “Wing Sing,” an imaginary Chinese American businessman from Los Angeles. Evans argues that by inventing a male persona to voice what Sui Sin Far herself experienced in the course of her travels, this female writer is able to provide important insights that are not available elsewhere regarding the Asian immigrant experience in North America.

Nalini Iyer, in her essay, provides an overview of literary works by immigrants in the United States from South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, and the Maldives. She discusses the evolution of South Asian American writing over a period of almost a century, identifying three distinct phases—South Asian “pioneers” from the 1890s to the end of World War II, the immigration boom from 1965 to 2000, and the post 9/11 era—that influenced the major themes in writing by South Asians in the United States. She argues that South Asian American writing reflects and resists the politics of American imperialism.

From an overview of South Asian American literature we move to an overview of Arab American literature. In her essay, Mejdulene B. Shomali discusses the difficulty of defining the category “Arab American” and delineates the three waves of Arab immigration to the United States (1800s–1925, 1945–1967 and 1965–present) as well as the corresponding three movements of Arab American literature. Through an analysis specifically of poet Marwa Helal’s chapbook, Shomali discusses how Helal, as a representative of contemporary Arab American writers, considers issues of movement, space and time, and ancestry.

Marion Christina Rohrleitner, in the analysis of the fiction and creative nonfiction of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, discusses how immigration can be an act of, in the words of philosopher Jonathan Lear, “radical hope.” By exploring the role of a variety of art—including narrative literature, music, sculpture, and visual art—in the lives of the protagonists of Danticat’s literary works, Rohrleitner demonstrates how creative imagination and daily artistic practice enable immigrants to go beyond the limitations of the present and express faith in a better future.

The link between immigration and creativity is also the focus of the first-generation Chinese American immigrant writer Ha Jin in his first novel about the Chinese diasporic community, A Free Life, in which the protagonist, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, has to negotiate between the material success usually associated with the American Dream and his own determination to become a poet in English. Te-hsing Shan examines how the novel deals with issues concerning the homeland and loyalty, the poetic ideals and practices of the protagonist along with their significance, and the way in which the protagonist is able to pursue his creative aspirations.

The complexities of undocumented life provide the focus of Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s essay. She delineates a move away from depictions of such immigrants as “deserving” and “meritorious” who only see the United States as “home,” which was common during the first decade of the 2000s. Since the implementation of DACA in 2012, she argues, DREAMer narratives have been more fully fleshed-out, veering away from the “good immigrant” stories and emphasizing belonging in the US as well as a multiplicity of places through memory, through the body, and through relationships. In the post-DACA era, she forecasts a continuation of DREAMer narratives that will contest and complicate prevailing negative stereotypes of undocumented immigrants as well as the life narratives prevalent earlier in the millennium.

R. Joseph Rodríguez considers how issues relating to migration and immigration, specifically among Latina/o youth, are depicted in the flourishing genre of young adult literature. His essay examines nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, with a particular focus on the depiction of undocumented immigration, and argues that such literary works both make visible and humanize the experiences of young immigrants who see themselves as new Americans and want their voices to be heard.

Like Caminero-Santangelo and Rodríguez, Maryse Jayasuriya examines the representations of undocumented immigrants—from Central Africa in this case—and their aspirations in Cameroonian novelist Imbolo Mbue’s novel Behold the Dreamers. The essay notes the relative paucity of writing on undocumented immigrants from Africa and Asia, and it shows how Mbue presents an undocumented immigrant family as strivers who first are drawn by the hegemonic American Dream and gradually become disenchanted with it, turning ultimately to a dream of success in their home country supported by their earnings from abroad.

African immigration is also the focus of Brian Yothers’s “Contemporary African Immigration and the Legacy of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing,” which considers Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 novel Homegoing as a response to the experience of twentieth-century African immigrants to the United States and the complex relationship between recent African immigrants and the historic African American community. The essay shows that Gyasi’s novel, although only explicitly about immigration towards the end, is engaged with questions of migration and immigrant identity throughout. The essay is particularly concerned to show how Gyasi uses the legacy of slavery in both Africa and the Americas to frame the twentieth and twenty-first-century African immigrant experience in the United States and thus demonstrates that this immigrant-authored novel speaks powerfully, if not exclusively, to the immigrant experience.

The essays in this volume, then, deal with works and authors across many national and generic boundaries, illustrating the richness of the literature of the immigrant experience in the United States today. That they also span three centuries, from Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan, and Sui Sin Far to the stunning array of narratives and poems being published today, suggests how urgent narrating the immigrant experience has been and continues to be in the literature of the United States.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Jayasuriya, Maryse. "About This Volume." Critical Insights: Immigrant Experience, The, edited by Maryse Jayasuriya, Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CIImmEx_0002.
APA 7th
Jayasuriya, M. (2018). About This Volume. In M. Jayasuriya (Ed.), Critical Insights: Immigrant Experience, The. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Jayasuriya, Maryse. "About This Volume." Edited by Maryse Jayasuriya. Critical Insights: Immigrant Experience, The. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2018. Accessed May 09, 2025. online.salempress.com.