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The immigrant experience is a central influence on American life, literature and culture. In The Uprooted (1951), the historian Oscar Handlin – a son of immigrants – said he’d intended to write a history of immigrants in American history. He then discovered that “the immigrants were American history.” The remaking of the self in a new place remains a large part of that history. The melting pot theory, in which different ethnic and religious groups are thought to blend together into a common culture, and the salad bowl model, in which groups are seen as integrating without losing their distinct cultures, explore the impact of immigration on identity. The Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz, recollecting himself arriving on the first day of first grade speaking no English and ‘looking like something out of a wetback comedy,” has remarked that for many Dominican-Americans like himself, immigration meant going back and forth, inhabiting two countries and two cultures without feeling entirely at home in either.” For a number of immigrants, arrival on American shores is no single event [but] going back and forth, actually or emotionally, constantly travelling between and negotiating more than one language and one culture.
The course will explore a variety of American immigrant experiences, including those of Eastern European Jewish-Americans, Irish-German-Americans, Haitian-Americans, German-Panamanian-Chinese Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Arab-Americans.
Students should purchase the following at the bookstore:
Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912) [PLEASE NOTE: This is also available free online]
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)
Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995)
Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi, (2003)
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (2007)
Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2018) |
