scholarly journals The Nigerian-American immigration experience: overcoming adversity through resilence.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Idigo
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Experience

Growing Up Indian, Becoming Immigrants

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-104
Author(s):  
Jennifer B. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Immigration Experience ◽  
Narrative Performances

Chapter 3 focuses on narratives about immigration and reveals performers’ interpretations of the immigration experience and the processes by which they shape their transnational social realities. A close reading of their performances uncovers the ways that dharm (“religion” or “duty”) shapes the Guptas and their social networks’ understandings of immigration, adjustment, and the identities that both precipitate and result from these experiences. Interpreting the Guptas’, their family’s, and their community’s narrative performances of immigration within the context of dharm demonstrates their participation in creating identities, shaping community, and reinterpreting dharm in a transnational context. Two features of the Guptas’ immigration narratives—ambivalence and comparison—work together to help these immigrants and their families enact their imagination in co-constructing their experience as transnational.

The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Socolovsky
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigration Experience ◽  
Immigrant Experiences

Cuban American literature and Oscar Hijuelos's texts in particular have generally been approached through a consideration of their material, multicultural aspects. This essay analyzes Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, on which there is little critical work, by combining the novel's descriptions of photography and immigrant experiences with theories of photography. My reading considers the placing of ghosts and memory in the narrative and problematizes the undialectical presence of death in it. Referring to Hijuelos's text as an “imagetext” (photographs exist in it only through descriptions, never appearing visually), I read it through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and his development of the wounding punctum of a photograph, which produces a melancholy lingering trace of the past in the present moment. In this reading, the immigration experience in Hijuelos's novel exceeds narrativization and is unrepresentable by it.

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