ENGL 271 The Literature and Film of American Immigration
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated racialized quotas and established a system for "skilled" immigrants to enter the country. This dramatic change meant new channels for migration--and new discourses about who should or shouldn't come to the US. With a focus on American literature and film after 1965, this course examines narratives about people moving across borders and the narrative practices required to define, filter, grant rights to, or exclude those people. In stories of coming to America, protagonists break with their pasts, seek work or schooling, come of age, find new homes, argue with their families, joke, and wrestle with the immigration process itself. While genres like the coming-of-age realist novel are commonly associated with these experiences, we will look at how other narrative forms--sci-fi stories, absurdist comedies, experimental poems--take aim at the shifting ways in which the nation constructs borders, human "illegality," and racialized conceptions of citizenship. We will also look at the meta-commentary provided by writers who reflect on the clichés of "good immigrant novels" or filmmakers situating plotlines beyond intergenerational culture clash scenarios. We will read these works in tandem with scholars and activists interested in the political and legal histories of immigrants in the US and transnational migration more broadly. Although our focus is post-1965, we will spend time with the earlier history of what Mae Ngai calls the "impossible subject": a person whose inclusion in the nation is "at once a social reality and a legal impossibility." These critical accounts will deepen our approach to imaginative depictions of immigration and complicate our received ideas about what it means to seek belonging from a nation-state. The syllabus may include Julie Otsuka's *The Buddha in the Attic*, Elaine Castillo's *America is Not the Heart*, Julia Alvarez's *How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents*, NoViolet Bulawayo's *We Need New Names*, Hernán Diaz's *In the Distance*, Gish Jen's *Typical American*, and the films *Minari* (2020), *Problemaista* (2023), *Past Lives* (2023), and *Sin Nombre* (2009).