A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America
In Migrant Sites, Dalia Kandiyoti presents a compelling corrective to the traditional immigrant and melting pot story. This original and wide-ranging study embraces Jewish, European, and Chicana/o and Puerto Rican literatures of migration and diasporization through the literary works of Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Estela Portillo Trambley, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, and Ernesto Quiñonez. The author offers a transformed understanding of the ways in which the sense of place shapes migration imaginaries in U.S. writing. Place is a crucial category, one that along with race, class, and gender, has a profound impact in shaping migration and diaspora identities and storytelling. Migrant Sites highlights enclosure as a prominent sense of place and translocality as its counterpart in diaspora experiences created in fiction. Repositioning national literature as diaspora literature, the author shows that migrant legacies such as colonialism, empire, borders, containment, and enclosure are part of the American story and constitute the “diaspora sense of place.”
Endorsements:
“With its focus on space and movement as key features that shape identity, Migrant Sites enriches our understanding of the history and literature of immigration and ethnicity in the U.S. This work is significant both for the fresh readings that it produces and for its contribution to the important spatial turn in American Studies.”—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
“Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures is a rich and timely contribution to a critical understanding of writing in diaspora and transnational contexts. Dalia Kandiyoti’s emphasis on the experience of place as a crucial component of diasporic literatures expertly illustrates the ways spatial imagination informs representations of cultural identity in displacement and migration. Through a comparative lens with its alternating foci on Jewish American and Puerto Rican and Chicana/o experience, Migrant Sites attests to the transnational character of modern American literature fostered by cultural traditions both within and outside the United States.”—Azade Seyhan, Fairbank Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Bryn Mawr College
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DALIA KANDIYOTI is a professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island.
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