The United States has often been called a “nation of immigrants.” It is no wonder, then, that there are so many narratives about the immigration experience in the United States in so many different genres—fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Although the essays in this volume cover a broad range of immigrant writing, there is a large body of material that goes beyond the scope of any individual volume. I mention these additional texts in this introduction to give readers an idea of the vast scope of the field of immigrant writing.

Broadly speaking, migration is the result of people moving from one location to another. Mass migrations have occurred as a result of war, persecution, famine, and other natural disasters as well as those caused by colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, which force people to move from their land of origin, their homeland, to a new location, a hostland. In other cases, people have chosen to migrate in order to seek a better life, more resources and opportunities, perhaps a higher standard of living.

Numerous terms have been used for immigrants, including exiles, expatriates, refugees, asylum seekers, and diasporics. The term “diaspora” has often been conflated with immigration. The original use of the term was in relation to the Jewish diaspora, and the term has also long been applied to the Armenian and Greek diasporic communities. According to Khachig Tölölyan, the term was initially used for very specific contexts—where groups of people were forced to move from one location to another but maintained their affiliation with each other and to their homeland, preserved their culture, traditions and a collective memory, and patrolled communal boundaries (7). Now the term “diasporic” is also used as a catchall for people who live away from their homeland in a hostland, in groups or as individuals.

The United States has been a particular locus of desire for immigrants. As Anupama Jain points out, “The American Dream is one of the most familiar and persistent narratives of Americanization. This is the rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps story of a strong (Protestant) work ethic. Few people would argue that this ‘dream’ is not one of the most recognizable signifiers for allegedly unique immigrant possibilities in the United States” (65) despite the fact that “the meaning of the dream remains as troublingly elusive as its attainment is for many Americans” (65).

In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie asserts that “America, a nation of immigrants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining the ways in which people cope with a new world” (20). Literary works about immigration have tended to focus on certain issues that immigrants have typically had to encounter. People who are forced or decide to move from one land to another face the difficulty of getting accustomed to a new, strange, unfamiliar location. They experience culture shock and are very often homesick, yearning for a homeland whether it continues to exist or not, and for the family and friends they have left behind or from whom they have been separated. They deal with feelings of loss and alienation. Frequently they struggle to survive in the new location, meaning that they have to find work, deal with poverty, and loss of status. They might have difficulties as a result of not being familiar or fluent with the dominant language or protocols of the hostland. They might also face racism, discrimination, and prejudice from the new society in which they find themselves, which might make them feel by turns invisible in the new environment or all too visible and exposed to racial or ethnic slurs, threats, and intimidation. Their narratives speak of courage and determination—of the will to survive, to persist, and to endure suffering and numerous obstacles for the sake of a better life and more opportunities—if not for themselves, then at least for their children. Such narratives include collections of short stories such as Who’s Irish? by Gish Jen, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen; novels such as Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu, Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee, and We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo; memoirs such as The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement by José Orduña.

Yet, as Edward Said has argued, immigrants have a unique way of seeing their experiences:

A related benefit, as R. Radhakrishnan observes, is that immigrants “experience distance as a form of critical enlightenment or a healthy ‘estrangement’ from their birthland, and to experience another culture or location as a reprieve from the orthodoxies of their own ‘given’ cultures” (126). Like travel narratives, immigration narratives show how self-fashioning is thereby possible in the new milieu, as illustrated, for instance, in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine. Immigrants who have succeeded in their fields in the United States have written memoirs—such as Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines or ’Tis by Frank McCourt—relating their literal and metaphorical journeys from homeland to hostland. Some narratives are somewhat lighthearted, such as Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen. Some immigrant memoirs concentrate more on delineating the often traumatic reasons for departure from the land of origin, including Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

As they attempt to settle in, first-generation immigrants are faced with the challenge of deciding to what extent they should maintain ties to, and preserve the traditions of, the homeland and to what extent they should adapt to and assimilate into the culture of the hostland. While it is necessary to make adjustments, accommodations and compromises in order to survive and even thrive in the new context, immigrants are faced with the dilemma of doing so without completely losing the culture and traditions of their land of origin. They fear loss of identity and dissolution and might observe the new mores of the hostland with confusion or suspicion. Some might cling to the traditions that existed in the homeland at the time of their departure or exile and be surprised when they return there after years or decades away to find that the culture of the homeland has changed in the intervening period.

This dilemma tends to be exacerbated by the arrival of the second generation. These offspring of immigrants are born and raised in the hostland. They have the advantages of being familiar from the beginning with the mores of the hostland but are faced with the dominance of one culture in the family home and another outside. Very often they find themselves straddling two cultures and perhaps two or more languages. They might act as interpreters—of both the culture and the language—for their parents. Unlike first-generation immigrants, in whom the culture of their land of origin might be ingrained, the second generation might be torn between two cultures or wish to embrace one and resent the imposition on them of the other, resulting in a divided identity. These difficulties can often lead to tensions between the first-generation parents and the second-generation offspring and are depicted in novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, and in poems such as “Assimilation” by Eugene Gloria and “Translation for Mamá” by Richard Blanco.

Conversely, there might be immigrants who have chosen to leave the land of origin due to conflicts with the sociopolitical or cultural context there and decide to assimilate completely to the hostland, fully embracing new cultural and societal norms. It might be the case that the children of such immigrants might be eager to discover the culture and traditions of their parents’ homeland, which also creates intergenerational problems. Second-generation immigrants might become emotionally invested and politically involved in their parents’ homeland and try to influence what happens there, as detailed in novels such as V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage.

Immigrant parents and diasporic communities might have difficulties reconciling themselves to Stuart Hall’s assertion that

First- and second-generation immigrants thus have to deal with the difficult reality of ongoing and unceasing negotiation entailed by cultural hybridity, which, according to Homi K. Bhabha is “[the] interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (4).

It is not only first- and second-generation immigrants that face difficulties. Third- and fourth-generation immigrants might also face issues based on race and ethnic or religious affiliations. These difficulties are heightened during times of conflict and war in the hostland if those conflicts and wars are with the land of origin of the immigrants or descendants of such immigrants. During World Wars I and II, immigrants to the United States from Germany, for example, had to show their loyalty to the hostland by anglicizing their names and switching from German to English at home for fear of repercussions. Japanese Americans were infamously interned during World War II and were also pressured to prove their loyalty to the hostland. Conflicting loyalties are depicted in John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, in which a young man answers “no” twice to a questionnaire asking whether he, a second-generation Japanese American, would be willing to serve in the US military and pledge loyalty to the United States; his refusal stems from his resentment at the fact that he and his family were interned. He is sent to prison for two years as a result and has to face hostility from his family and community afterwards. Following the events of 9/11, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, Sikh Americans and other peoples of color have had to face increased scrutiny and racial profiling as well as persecution and hate crimes, as illustrated in novels such as Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Over the years, changing immigration policies have also meant that certain immigrants have had to deal with restrictions such as not being able to bring their families to the United States, leading to enforced and prolonged separations along with isolation and alienation, while some groups faced quota systems for decades. Undocumented immigrants have also had to live secret lives, in perpetual fear of deportation.

While the United States has been the desired location for many immigrants and is the focus for this collection, there are many literary works about other locations that have drawn immigrants. Novels such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners; Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen; Andrea Levy’s Small Island; Monica Ali’s Brick Lane; Leila Aboulela’s Minaret; and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire are set in the United Kingdom, which has its own multicultural society as a result of the arrival of immigrants from its former colonies. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis 2 details the hardships of the protagonist when she leaves her homeland of Iran and tries to find a sense of belonging in Vienna. Michael Ondaatje in his poetry collection Handwriting and M. G. Vassanji in his novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall both write about multiple displacements and affiliations: Sri Lanka, England, and Canada in the case of the former and India, Kenya, and Canada in the case of the latter. Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel A Change of Skies focuses on Sri Lankans reinventing themselves in Australia, while Channa Wickremesekera’s novel Distant Warriors depicts a diasporic community in Australia that is divided on ethnic lines and, ironically, replicates the tensions of the homeland that many of them sought to escape through emigration.

As the range of novels, poems, and memoirs discussed in this essay and in the volume as a whole makes clear, the immigrant experience is vast in both scope and variety. Immigration has been a defining feature in the literature of the United States throughout its history, and immigrant literature continues to expand as an increasingly substantial part of literary production and criticism in the United States. Beyond the boundaries of the United States, there are many literary works that deal with the immigrant experience around the globe, and some of the works listed in this essay can serve as an opportunity for further reading that explores the literature of the immigrant experience as both American literature and, indeed, world literature.