Description
Book SynopsisGlenda R. Carpio argues that we need a new paradigm for migrant fiction. She shows how contemporary authors expose the historical legacies and political injustices that produce forced migration.
Trade ReviewGlenda R. Carpio’s superb book reframes our understanding of migration by highlighting the aesthetic strategies that authors like Julia Otsuka, Teju Cole, and Valeria Luiselli use to push readers away from empathy and toward understanding. In transcendent prose, Carpio illustrates how they frustrate readers’ desires for assimilation while revealing how we are all implicated in the economic, political, and ideological forces that create this global phenomenon. -- Paula M. L. Moya, author of
The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismMigrant Aesthetics makes a powerful intervention into contemporary thinking about the global migration crisis. From her opening analysis of stories by Franz Kafka and Dinaw Mengestu to her closing account of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's
Undocumented Americans, Carpio uses insightful close reading and contextual analysis to develop the idea of migrant aesthetics, a set of formal strategies that contemporary authors use to enable readers not simply to empathize with the plights of migrants but also to think critically about texts that portray migration and the discourses that surround them. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in either migration studies or contemporary world literature. -- Cyrus R. K. Patell, author of
Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late Twentieth CenturyMigrant Aesthetics is a manifesto for contemporary writers, revealing what comes after assimilation and multiculturalism. As Carpio shows, writers now both embrace and confront their readers with indirection, understatement, and multiple perspectives. Deeply indebted to the literary tradition from Kafka to Nabokov and Sebald, their works challenge the teleological program of individual, empathy-craving storytelling that Aleksandar Hemon calls migration literature’s überplot. They urge a new understanding of such collective experiences as ‘carceral migration’ in the global contexts of empires and thus also develop an ethics of migration. -- Werner Sollors, author of
Ethnic ModernismThe author’s trenchant takes shed new light on critically acclaimed works of literature and illuminate the concerns and aesthetic techniques they share. It’s a penetrating assessment of the American immigrant literature canon. * Publishers Weekly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Migrant Aesthetics
1. Migrant Anonymity: Strategic Opacity in Dinaw Mengestu and Teju Cole
2. Migrant Refraction: Aleksandar Hemon’s Anti-Autobiography
3. Migrant Solidarity: Valeria Luiselli’s Echo Canyon
4. Carceral Migration: Julie Otsuka’s Internment Novels
5. Apocalypse and Toxicity: Junot Díaz’s Migrant Aesthetics
6. Carceral Migration II: The Flores Declarations and Edwidge Danticat’s
Brother, I’m DyingEpilogue: “Chinga La Migra”—Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s
The Undocumented AmericansNotes
Index
