Migrant Aesthetics

By most accounts, immigrant literature deals primarily with how immigrants struggle to adapt to their adopted countries. Its readers have come to expect stories of identity formation, of how immigrants create ethnic communities and maintain ties to countries of origin. Yet such narratives can center exceptional stories of individual success or obscure the political forces that uproot millions of people the world over.Glenda R. Carpio argues that we need a new paradigm for migrant fiction. Migrant Aesthetics shows how contemporary authors—Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, and Junot Díaz—expose the historical legacies and political injustices that produce forced migration through artistic innovation. Their fiction rejects the generic features of immigrant literature—especially the acculturation plot and the use of migrant narrators as cultural guides who must appeal to readerly empathy. They emphasize the limits of empathy, insisting instead that readers recognize their own roles in the realities of migration, which, like climate change, is driven by global inequalities. Carpio traces how these authors create literary echoes of the past, showing how the history of (neo)colonialism links distinct immigrant experiences and can lay the foundation for cross-ethnic migrant solidarity. Revealing how migration shapes and is shaped by language and narrative, Migrant Aesthetics casts fiction as vital testimony to past and present colonial, imperial, and structural displacement and violence.

Glenda 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., Migrant 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., Migrant 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 Aleksander 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.

Glenda R. Carpio is the chair of the English Department and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008), coeditor of African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019).