The Children of Other Lands and the Strategic Dissonance of Migrant Marginality

Abstract

Abstract This essay takes up a long-forgotten book series to argue for an overlooked historical role of early migrant narratives. These works pursued innovative formal experimentation in the era of literary realism rather than obsolete realist techniques in the time of modernisms. Migrant writers adapted techniques drawn from naturalism (by exchanging radical contingency for determinism) to depict lives buffeted by unpredictable global as well as national forces. These authors infused their works with productive distortion, turning the methods of anthropology and sociology into offbeat narratives that loop time, shuffle perspectives, mix genres and use photographs that interrogate their own evidentiary status. Not only did these writers anticipate later narrative modes of prominent modernists and postmodernists, but they also developed forms and aesthetics that long predate innovations by twentieth-century writers of migrancy, such as Carlos Bulosan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Despite twenty-first century expectations that earlier eras had simpler notions of transnational subjectivity, early US migrant narratives not only eschewed the unified paradigms formulated by contemporaries, but the emergent genre of migrant narrative preceded those paradigms. To combat the massification of immigrant experience, migrant intellectuals fashioned self-reflexive narrative forms to represent their native-informant narrator-protagonists simultaneously as both social scientific observers and the objects of analysis. Despite twenty-first century expectations that earlier eras had simpler notions of transnational subjectivity, early US migrant narratives not only eschewed the unified paradigms formulated by contemporaries, but . . . preceded those paradigms and actively, if vainly, sought to counter [them].