Contemporary American Immigrant Literature

Abstract

Since the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which abolished the national quota system set in place by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1920, more than 20 million immigrants have entered the United States, half of whom arrived during the 1980s, mostly from countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The new literature of immigration therefore deals with experiences of people who are not of European descent; it engages with American discourses of race as these intertwine with those of home countries and challenges the traditional focus in immigrant texts on the process of assimilation. Quite often this literature blurs the distinction between “immigrant” and “exile.” Focusing on Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007), and two earlier texts, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), a classic immigrant narrative, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1953), a text that is rarely discussed as an immigrant narrative per se, I explore significant shifts in the tropes and aesthetic form of recent American immigrant fiction.