Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy

This incisive analysis by Harvard University English professor Carpio (Laughing Fit to Kill) explores how such authors as Teju Cole, Edwidge Danticat, and Dinaw Mengestu are complicating immigration stories in American fiction. Carpio argues that the tendency of much literature about immigration to focus on issues of assimilation obscures the stories of migrants who have to “struggle continually for basic human rights” and the “forces that have led to their migration in the first place,” which are often rooted in the foreign policies of colonial powers. Surveying authors who provide more politically minded perspectives, Carpio suggests that Julie Otsuka’s use of first-person plural in her novel The Buddha in the Attic, which is told from the perspective of early 20th-century Japanese emigrant “picture brides” who are forced into American internment camps during WWII, underscores “the historical erasure of personhood through the criminalization of migrants.” Elsewhere, Carpi contends that Junot Díaz draws attention to colonial violence in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by depicting how a curse unleashed by “the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola” plagues the Dominican de León family for generations, up through their move to New Jersey. The 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. (July)