Lives Beyond Borders: U.S. Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lives Beyond Borders: U.S. Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler Marta Caminero-Santangelo LIVES BEYOND BORDERS: U. S. IMMIGRANT WOMEN'S LIFE WRITING, NATIONALITY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE, by Ina C. Seethaler. New York: State University of New York Press, 2021. 232 pp. $95.00 hardback. Lives Beyond Borders: U. S. Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler is an original study that brings together widely disparate immigrant women's life writing to argue that these authors and activists disrupt conventions of traditional autobiography by telling [End Page 371] powerful life stories that challenge a variety of dominant conceptions about and stereotypes of immigration. Seethaler suggests that these texts enter the public sphere as counter-narratives (though Seethaler does not use that terminology nor refer to theories of counter-narrative) that can serve a political function in the ongoing struggles over the very meanings of immigration, refugees, and citizenship, as well as the policies that frame and regulate these phenomena. The great strength of Lives Beyond Borders is the diversity and range of texts chosen for analysis. Each memoir represents a case study in a particular situation of immigration to the United States and poses specific challenges regarding the kinds of discourse that frame that situation, although Seethaler takes pains to acknowledge and consider the intersectionality of nationality, gender, race, and citizenship that plays itself out in each author's story. Seethaler's overarching claim is that these different immigrant women all manipulate genre to craft non-traditional memoirs with a specifically political thrust, pushing against rigid notions of national identity. Chapter one considers perhaps the most familiar immigration narrative for United States audiences in the twenty-first century: undocumented immigration from Mexico. Examining the young adult memoir Journey of Hope (2007) by Rosalina Rosay, this chapter considers the influence of testimonio, the genre of Latin American life writing made famous by Rigoberta Menchú and the numerous scholars who wrote about her memoir. Seethaler argues that Journey of Hope is in fact a "trickster text" that enlists audience sympathies through a rhetoric of gratitude and patriotism in order to politicize readers on immigration policy (p. 35). Indeed, the chapter's title, "A Genre for Justice," clearly alludes to and appropriates critical understandings of the goals of testimonio for immigrant women's memoirs. In a more general sense, Seethaler seems to want to appropriate the theorized goals of testimonio for all the texts under consideration in her study, claiming that the authors are writing collective texts rather than merely individual life stories to address a situation of urgency demanding redress and to attempt to move an audience to action. Chapter two considers Willow Weep for Me (1998), a memoir about clinical depression by Ghanian immigrant Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, to argue persuasively that the lack of attention to Danquah's immigrant experience in this text shortchanges the memoir's complex treatment of national and cultural identity, race, and disability. Chapter three turns to a different situation of "immigration"—transnational adoption—to explore how Jane Jeong Trenka's memoir The Language of Blood (2003), about being adopted from Korea by white Christian parents in the United States, serves as a trenchant critique of the international adoption industry and the disparities [End Page 372] of global power that it reinscribes at the expense of vulnerable birth mothers in the sending countries. Chapter four takes up Persian Girls (2006), a memoir by Nahid Rachlin, who came from Iran to the United States to study prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, arguing that this text constitutes a form of collective memoir by including the voices of Iranian women left behind. Some of these voices are fictionalized, but the most prominent is the nonfictional voice of Rachlin's older sister, Pari, who remained in Iran trapped in a patriarchal marriage and eventually died mysteriously. Her letters constitute part of Rachlin's text, creating, according to Seethaler, a doubling that foregrounds the necessity of women's empowerment as a "global social justice issue"—all without reducing Iran to only its oppression or denying Iranian women their own agency (p. 135). The final...