Immigrant Narratives Research Articles

The portrayal of the Oriental Jew in literary school anthologies: from the establishment of Israel until the present time

ABSTRACT The aim of this research was to examine the narrative featuring oriental characters in the Sheaves school anthologies (1958–1966) in contrast to the Roots and Wings anthologies (2009). The findings show that in the Sheaves anthologies there are only three stories representing oriental characters. All three deal with the Zionist narrative of immigration to Israel. Two stories extol the ‘melting pot’ immigration policy forcing immigrants to experience re-socialization by shedding their previous identity. However, in the Roots and Wings anthologies, there are six literary works representing the Oriental characters. Yet, two of the narratives perpetuate the oriental typecast.

The Immigration Narratives in Modern Hebrew Literature

The Immigration Narratives in Modern Hebrew Literature

“Immigration, that’s what everyone’s thinking about …”

Abstract This article examines the 2016 British EU referendum and the domestic debates through citizens’ voices in the media, specifically on the emotions and narratives, on The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Express, the week before the referendum. British citizens felt, in their words, “bullied because of [their] political correctness” and pointed their anger and dissatisfaction against the EU (and Merkel’s) “obsession for open borders”. The analysis underlines that these emotions and narratives, combining immigration and sovereignty, have remained embedded in the post-Brexit days, and go back not just to Billig’s banal nationalism (1995), but show that voting Leave represented respect towards true British values, the “core country” as conceptualised by Taggart (2000). Powellism (Hampshire 2018) and Wright’s “encroanchment” of Englishness (2017), and the analysis on the immigration narrative explain how anti-immigration and sovereignty discourse is persisting and is influencing the social and political relation of Britain with Europe.

Becoming Canadian: Immigrant narratives of professional attainment

We investigate how economic immigrants in Canada negotiate their identity in the process of “becoming Canadian” through an analysis of public texts. Drawing on the master narrative framework, we examine the interplay between individual and societal narratives as immigrants grapple with the tension between notions of “desirable” immigrants as those that are well integrated professionally and the reality of facing career related barriers. Among those whose success stories align with the master narrative of professional attainment there was little questioning of this expectation, thereby allowing it to remain invisible. Among those who had not (yet) achieved work related success in the receiving country, they tended to engage alternative narratives elaborating on the antecedents, outcomes, and barriers to labor market participation. Despite the countering nature of these alternative narratives, they strengthen the societal expectation of professional success as a key pathway to inclusion, thereby reinforcing the rigidity of this narrative. We contribute to literature on the social construction of national identity by examining the process of becoming national and the role of labor market participation in immigrants’ perceptions of inclusion in their new society. Our study highlights the importance of including immigrants’ voices in the construction of a more inclusive society, which may aid in breaking down exclusionary narratives of national identity.

Decolonizing the Immigration Narrative: A Queer Ecology in Chinelo Okparanta’s “America”

Decolonizing the Immigration Narrative: A Queer Ecology in Chinelo Okparanta’s “America”

Fear and Hate in Alabama and Beyond: Narratives of Immigration in the Trump Campaign

In August 2015, in one of his first appearances as President-hopeful, Donald Trump galvanized his audience in Mobile, Alabama, by criminalizing immigrants and attacking sanctuary cities. Capitalizing on fear, he referred to the tragic deaths of two white women by the hands of undocumented immigrants. Trump knew those high-profile cases would resonate with Alabamians who have been fed similar rhetoric by Fox News and its echo chamber on the web. This essay explores the use of hate speech and negative portrayals of immigrants during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump with particular attention to the progressive criminalization of foreign-born individuals and Mexicans specifically. It also points to the current discourse dominated today in conservative media by the narrative of security, a narrative that today lumps together illegal immigration, crime, and terrorism.The essay investigates how such narrative has been reproduced by politicians and media pundits: to begin with, by Kansas Secretary of State and attorney Kris Kobach, who drafted the harshest state-level, anti-immigration bill that passed in 2011 in Alabama, HB 56, which represented an experiment in the “removal by attrition” (or self-deportation) strategy; by the former U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, once a U.S. Senator from Mobile, renown for being “tough on crime” and for his restrictionist stance on immigration; and by the once-Fox News TV host, Bill O’Reilly, who spearheaded the efforts to pass a law that further criminalize immigrants by establishing mandatory minimums for illegal reentry. The essay explores the role played by self-segregation in reinforcing stereotypical ideas about “the Other;” explains why immigration is the perfect topic to spin; and illustrates the lingering influence of cable TV in “cultivating” views about immigrants. The essay concludes by pointing to the emergence of alternative narratives of immigration in Alabama and beyond and provides further directions for research on the topic.

Complexity below, complexity above: Intra-class conflict, immigration imaginaries, and elite alliances in the Arizona–Mexico borderlands

This article develops an interdisciplinary, relational approach to political power as a theoretical framework for analyzing how grassroots immigration activists interact with and influence elites responsible for constructing immigration policy. We illuminate this theoretical approach with examples from ethnographic field research with pro- and anti-immigration grassroots activists in southern Arizona to show how competing narrative frames about the border are used by grassroots actors as part of their efforts to influence elite policy-making. We conclude that shifts in US immigration policy have been shaped by intra-class, racialized, conflicts between pro- and anti-immigration factions within the working class, and vertical alliances between elite factions from above and working-class factions from below. We suggest that the criminology of mobility can be advanced by utilizing an interdisciplinary, relational theory of political power to examine how intra-class struggle and inter-class alliances dynamically shape immigration narratives and policies.

Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture by N. Michelle Murray

Reviewed by: Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture by N. Michelle Murray Kathryn Everly Murray, N. Michelle. Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture. U of North Carolina P, 2018. 226 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4696-4746-3. Headlines, debates and tensions surrounding worldwide immigration abound in most major European presses and political spheres. Spain is no different as evidenced in growing concern over the xenophobic political posturing of conservative party VOX and, at the same time, the plethora of images of overcrowded pateras filled with people seeking refuge on the shores of southern Europe. N. Michelle Murray takes all of this into account in her study of immigrant female domestic workers in Spain, Home Away from Home. She uses statistical information on immigration trends and recent labor laws as a backdrop to her detailed analyses of contemporary literature and film, assuring her reader that art provides unique insight through individual voices. The introduction details the differences between domestic work and other forms of immigrant labor. Domestic workers are unique in that they are not considered "stealing" jobs from nationals, but rather they permeate the very heart of state and social identity formation. Murray defines "domestic labor not as mere work but as a special relationship guided by an ethic of care and a singular affective relationship between employers and employee that distinguishes it from other forms of labor" (14). She looks specifically at how literature can inform politics of inequality through "emotional positionalities entrenched in discourses of power" (17). The idea of difference as well as postcolonial hegemonies serve to further marginalize the domestic worker within the complex matrix of the immigrant work force in Spain. Murray comments on a variety of popular theories on aspects of postcolonial (Fanon) and postcolonial feminist studies (Mohanty Talpade) in order to articulate the layered and nuanced positionality and experience of immigrant women domestic workers in Spain. She moves effortlessly through these theories and others, including Freud and the uncanny, constructing a convincing framework in which she analyzes the texts at hand. Murray also includes sections of certain laws and official state bulletins as examples of the seemingly progressive nature of democratic Spanish legalese, but it is through her careful, illuminating analyses of the literary and filmic texts that she reveals how individual experience undermines the appearance of equality. It is through critical analyses that we can (try to) make sense of the inherent contradictions of social, racial, class, and gender hierarchies. In Chapter 1, Murray explores the precarious situation of Filipina domestic workers in Juan Madrid's short story "Metro Tirso de Molina" (1987) and José [End Page 173] Ángel Mañas's Historias del Kronen (1994). The female subject from a previously colonialized territory is represented in the body of the domestic worker that is defined and defiled by the white patriarchy. The home is constructed as a temporary haven that promises economic stability but is ultimately a source of oppression and rejection for the immigrant worker. Chapter 2 reveals how both oppression and opportunity define the experience of the domestic sphere in Ángeles Caso's Contra el viento (2009) and José Ovejero's Nunca pasa nada (2007). The home in these cases becomes both a retreat from society and a site of solidarity among women (91). A highlight of this chapter, and the entire study, is Murray's lucid, well-informed discussion of transnational feminism in relation to third wave feminism's shortfalls and postcolonial sites of engagement between migrant and national women. Murray turns to film in Chapter 3 with her analysis of Amador directed by Fernando León de Aranoa (2010) and Sebastián Cordero's Rabia (2009). She reconsiders the Kristevian notion of the abject in Amador, where the maternal body becomes a site of progress and assimilation instead of the rejected abject horrific mother/other. Murray deftly analyzes the home as a site of death and decay of a patriarchal, xenophobic tradition that at the same time harbors hope through the character of the pregnant immigrant caregiver. The antithesis of the abject maternal body, the pregnant young women in these films bring the...

ASPIRE, Los Angeles, CA

ASPIRE, Los Angeles, CA1 Ji In Kit Lee (bio) Stories are extremely important, and in my life very relevant as well. The power of some stories is what changes the minds of some people outside of the immigrant community. My story starts with the realization of the implications of my immigration status when I was a high school senior. Like a lot of undocumented immigrant students, it was difficult to confront a reality that was unexpected, because [we are] told that as long as you try hard in this country, you'll get somewhere—the American Dream essentially. So feeling like [I was] ambushed by a situation that I couldn't control was really difficult at the time. My alternative solution to going to a four-year college, which was what I was anticipating, was to go to a community college. I think at first that whole stigma of going to community college, dealing with that was difficult. But going to community college and hearing stories and learning and being able to be in the presence of a lot of different people coming from different walks of life was very important to me. It grounded me as a human being. During the past two years, it's been an amazing journey as a human being but also as someone who's part of the movement [for immigrant justice]. During my community college endeavors, I was exposed to an internship program called Dream Summer2 where I met undocumented activists from all over the country. Through that I was able to find a support group and network, ASPIRE Los Angeles3, an undocumented group of Asian Pacific Islanders, and that was really important, because often, the immigration narrative shows only one side of the story. It's the narrative that dominates the mainstream dialogue, but immigration in general is also portrayed as affecting only the Latino community, which is untrue. Being affected by the model minority myth which attempts to reduce our experiences, it was really important that an organization like ASPIRE existed in order to increase the visibility and to [End Page 113] uplift our narratives as undocumented Asian and Pacific Islander youth. I remember the very first time that I came out publicly about my status. A surreal experience because [was] something that [I held] as a fear and as a weakness for so long, and then [I released it] in front of a lot of different people that [I didn't] know. The fear of deportation is very real in our community, so having to step back and just [be public] was really difficult. But once I [went public] I felt an empowerment that I've never experienced. This is why I'm here today speaking to you. It's interesting that the more visibility I had within my community, I felt safer even though under the law it just didn't seem like that would be the case. We weren't being silent, and yet we felt more safe, and we felt much more empowered than ever. Ji In Kit Lee Ji In Kit Lee is an IJC Community Fellow at the MinKwon Center for Community Action. She studies and organizes to interrogate the crossroads between the U.S. immigration system and the prison-industrial complex. She graduated with a BA in politics from Pomona College. Notes 1. Editor's note: This is an edited transcript of a presentation by a member of what was formerly known as ASPIRE Los Angeles at a 2015 conference on the topic of Asian migration. I've provided references to websites related to the organizations mentioned in the presentation. 2. Dream Summer, https://www.labor.ucla.edu/what-we-do/dream-resource-center/dream-summer/ 3. UPLIFT, http://www.upliftlosangeles.org/hxstory-mission-statement/ Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

Immigrant Identities and the Shaping of a Racialized American Self

Immigration scholars largely focus on adaptation processes of immigrant groups, while race scholars focus on structural barriers nonwhite immigrants face. By comparing nonwhite immigrants with native-born Americans, we can better understand how racial logics affect the identification of racial minorities in the United States. Drawing on 153 interviews with Indian, Caribbean, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, and comparing their narratives to those of black native-born respondents, the authors find similar understandings of American identity across immigrant groups as well as barriers to recognition as American shared by immigrants and native-born blacks. Immigrant narratives continue to reify the United States as a white nation, thus leading to their exclusion by default.

Book Review: Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss: Lessons from the German American Midwest

Book Review: Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss: Lessons from the German American Midwest

Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton

Research Article| December 01 2018 Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton Elizabeth Titrington Craft Elizabeth Titrington Craft Elizabeth Titrington Craft is an assistant professor of music at the University of Utah, where she teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, music of the United States, musical theater, and opera. Her research examines musical theater from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on racial and ethnic representation, immigrant narratives, constructions of nationhood, marketing, and reception. Her published work appears in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical, and Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000. She received her PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 429–447. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0429 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth Titrington Craft; Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 429–447. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0429 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Media Representations of Immigration in the Chilean Press: To a Different Narrative of Immigration?

This article examines representations of immigration in Chilean newspapers. From January to December 2016, a total of 507 articles from three mainstream newspapers were analyzed. The findings show a dual discourse on immigration in the Chileans press: a criminalization of immigrants, which frame them as delinquents, deviant, and dangerous people, and a positive and more humanizing discourse, which portrays them as people who deserve to be protected by the Chilean society. The study also finds a shift in the way media sources are representing immigration compared to previous reports, characterized by presenting alternative images of migrants, a more cautious use of language, and increased attention to the voices of governmental and religious leaders. Nevertheless, this shift has also intensified the “difference” and “otherness” of foreigners in Chile by repeatedly focusing on their nationality and differentiating between the “good” and “bad” immigrants.

Committed, Grateful, and Worthy of Acceptance: Master Chef Israel and the Social Construction of Immigration Narratives

The rhetoric of nations, such as Israel, often assigns immigrants social positions in nationalist reconstructions. Given the active role the media has taken in reconstructing the nation, this paper suggests looking at Master Chef Israel (MCI) as an arena in which immigrant contestants are staged as recruited to engage in the reconstruction and branding of Israel. A narrative analysis of five seasons of MCI and interviews with 15 contestants tracked three narratives, each of which reveals a different mode of branding Israel. The show branded Jewish immigrants as equipped with the necessary capital to become Israelis, while those who converted to Judaism and immigrated to Israel were expected to show commitment both to their new religion and to their new country. In the third narrative, MCI staged the patriotism of individuals who immigrated after marrying an Israeli citizen as a gradually emerging sentiment based on the extent to which their difference enabled the incorporation of an Israeli component into their overall identity.

Immigrant Narratives: The Ottoman Sultans’ Portraits in Elisabeth Leitner’s Family Photo Album, circa 1862–72

Abstract This article is a study of the family photo album of Elisabeth Leitner (ca. 1842?–1908), a Hungarian immigrant in the Ottoman empire. The album contains a complete set of cartes de visite portraits of the Ottoman sultans by the Abdullah Frères. As the only surviving example of such a collection with a known provenance, it provides a rare opportunity for understanding how such images were used in the context of identity formation and social mobility undertaken by a member of the immigrant population. The album, which has never been studied before, is also a fascinating source for investigating the history of Hungarian immigrants in the Ottoman empire who were displaced after the 1848 Revolution. The article approaches the intriguingly autobiographical album by means of a close reading of Elisabeth Leitner’s diaries and unfinished autobiography. My interpretation serves to dismantle notions of a carefree global cosmopolitanism and exposes a historiographical bias that privileges men and their collections of images and ethnographic artifacts over those of women. Elisabeth Leitner’s writings and photographic collection also represent a vast and entirely untapped resource for investigating cultural contacts between Europe and the Ottoman empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Whiteness in paradise: Japanese immigrant narratives of identity, collective action, and Japan's national responsability

En la década de los cincuenta, el gobierno dominicano, bajo la presidencia de Rafael Trujillo, ofreció tierras gratuitas a los inmigrantes japoneses para que se instalaran en la frontera domínicohaitiana. Las colonias japonesas -o colonias agriculturales- fueron parte de los proyectos de construcción de la nación en la República Dominicana (RD) y en Japón, lo cual posiciona a las colonias japonesas como una solución para el “problema haitiano” y para la sobrepoblación, respectivamente. Sin embargo, a lo largo del tiempo las colonias fallaron, dejando a muchos migrantes japoneses decepcionados y con la necesidad de navegar su identidad nacional entre dos estados. Este artículo examina la manera en la que los inmigrantes japoneses cambiaron intereses locales y nacionales, ideologías y experiencias vividas para llevar a cabo una demanda en contra del gobierno japonés por una infundada experiencia paradisíaca de inmigración en la RD. El caso en la corte japonesa provee un argumento irresistible para explorar cómo los inmigrantes pusieron de moda nuevamente discursos nacionales de identidad y acciones legales colectivas para hacer responsable a su gobierno natal por su asentamiento, mientras también abrazaban múltiples identidades nacionales y etno-raciales en su nueva patria.

‘Hey yo, I’m just like my country’: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an American chronicle

Abstract The article discusses teaching the libretto of Miranda’s Hamilton as a uniquely American text (to undergraduate literature students in the United States). It details approaching the rap opera as a clash of ideologies known as versions of the American Dream. It touches upon genre distinctions from chronicle play (as adaptation), to the adversarial plot, to the American immigrant narrative.

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

“Someone Kept Sacrificing”: Disentangling Gender Ideology in Immigrant Narratives of Social Reproduction

“Doing gender,” the concept proposed by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman in 1987, has been criticized on two fronts: first, it leaves little room for gender to be undone; second, it fails to recognize the systemic factors that contribute to the maintenance of gender inequality. A host of feminist studies in the 1980s and 1990s established migration as a catalyst to undo gender, in that migration tends to disrupt conventional gender roles and to enable gender-atypical work-family arrangements. This study draws on the narratives of forty-two heterosexual partnered immigrants of Indian origin, living in Canada, whom I asked about their engagement with the Canadian labor market and about their gendered division of household labor. I found that this group of newcomers are not undoing gender and becoming more gender egalitarian after migrating, as earlier studies suggested they might. They experience racial discrimination in the Canadian labor market, thus destabilizing their career trajectories and making them realize that their buying power is lower in Canada, which influences them to take gender-typical paths to negotiate social reproduction. The article concludes with a call for a more race-, class-, and gender-conscious account of gender ideology in different postmigratory contexts.

‘The Russians are back’: Symbolic boundaries and cultural trauma in immigration from the former Soviet Union to the Czech Republic

This study contributes to the literature on migration and the construction of the symbolic boundaries of belonging. It explores the neglected topic of the role of collective memory and, in particular, cultural trauma, in the processes of negotiation of the symbolic boundaries between immigrants and the native-born. It does so by studying the case of post-Cold War immigration from three countries of the former Soviet Union—Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia—to the Czech Republic, focusing on immigrants’ experiences of being assigned responsibility for “1968,” the Warsaw Treaty Troops’ military intervention into Czechoslovakia and its subsequent occupation by the Soviet army. Analysis of the narratives of immigrants about their everyday encounters with Czechs advances the understanding of symbolic boundary-making processes by identifying two types of responses the immigrants employ for contesting the stigma of the perpetrators imposed on them in the Czech immigration context. The first involves “differentiation,” which aims at redrawing the symbolic boundaries between perpetrators and victims. The second response involves “individualization,” in which immigrants completely dissociate from the past acts of violence of the Soviet regime. This study offers insight into the micro-politics of nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe.