Narrating the Immigrant Experience: Three Adult Educators’ Perspectives

In this collaborative autoethnography, three immigrant adult education scholars examine diverse ways in which their experiences with racialization as immigrants in the United States have informed their scholarship and practice. The three authors originate from different parts of the world and use different theoretical frameworks—critical literary studies; critical theory; and postcolonial and Critical Race Theory, respectively—to complicate the immigrant Self and story. They argue that the use of autoethnography in adult education has the potential to illuminate issues of class, race, gender, and nationality to disrupt the typical immigrant narrative and allow for the advent of new immigrant stories and Subjects. Each narrative is unique; however, they do share the following commonalities: Critique of the postcolonial condition and the colonization of the Subject and culture; complicating the Black–White binary paradigm of race; centering anti-racist praxis; and suggestions for decolonizing the Self and adult education. The authors engage in this anti-racist work in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, in an effort to dismantle systemic inequities and give voice to the subaltern. Patterns arising from their examination of these issues reveal new questions adult educators could consider as we teach, learn with, and from immigrant adult learners, whose cultural-historical contexts remain multi-layered and complex, rather than linear.

The Immigrant Narrative

The chapter on the immigrant narrative explains the role of human narratives in identity development and explains the origins, meanings, and importance of the quintessential American narrative, which is known as the narrative of the redemptive self. It explains how understanding the dynamics of this particular narrative facilitates the understanding of the American cultural experience and how many aspects of this narrative parallel the immigrant experience. It discusses the concepts of historical truth and narrative truth. It explains how the use of narratives can serve as a useful therapeutic tool to help the immigrant work through the traumas and losses associated with migration and to negotiate the different stages of transformation of the immigrant’s identity. This chapter also explains the neurobiology of memory formation and the distortions of memory and narrative that may result from psychological trauma. It discusses how psychotherapy involves the creation of new, more adaptive narratives that can provide healing and personal growth and its relevance in the immigrant experience. It also discusses immigrant narratives in contemporary literature and how these can be used as a therapeutic tool with the younger generations of immigrants. The chapter is illustrated with various clinical cases.

Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health

Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health is a unique book because it explains culture and identity from a developmental perspective, exploring the psychological, social, and biological aspects of the immigrant and refugee experience in the United States and how they help to shape the person’s cultural identity. It also covers the sociological, anthropological, political, and economic aspects of the immigrant experience and how these variables impact mental health, thus presenting the experience of migration and acculturation from a very broad and humanistic perspective, illustrated with multiple real-life case examples. The book explains how a broader access to travel and new communication technologies are responsible for the rapid global dissemination of cultural norms, values, and beliefs across national borders, facilitating a process of inter-culturation, in which both the new arrivals and members of the host culture are influenced and transformed by their interactions with one another and how American children, adolescents and young adults are at the forefront of such new multicultural identity formation. It describes the emergence of transnational identities, the meaning of pilgrimages, the experiences of return migrations and the importance of the American narrative, which is at its core, an immigrant narrative. This is a book about the American identity and how immigrants have been absorbed into American society and how they continue to enlarge and transform America and the cultural identities of its inhabitants.

A Political Action against the Good Immigrant Narrative

This brief article draws from research on the undocumented student experience and incorporates personal perspectives about the complexity behind the good immigrant-model, minority narrative on identity formation. From a de-colonial lens, this article aims to emphasize the impact of the DREAM(Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors)-er narrative on the immigrants right’s movement and urges a need to separate the narrative from the movement as a political action to continue to diversify immigration reform advocacy as more inclusive of various immigrant and undocumented sub-communities. Lastly, this article aims to challenge the sociopolitical construct of the undocumented term on identity and introduces the importance of person-centered language to externalize undocumented legal status from the individual to position it as a circumstance rather than an identity.

Do You Want to Tell Your Own Narrative?”: How One Teacher and Her Students Engage in Resistance by Leveraging Community Cultural Wealth

This qualitative case study offers a window into one classroom in which one Latinx English language arts teacher and her newcomer high school students tapped into community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) as they engaged in literacy practices to resist oppression, denounce discrimination, and strive for social justice. We draw upon Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth (CCW) to understand how teachers can encourage resistance among historically marginalized students within the current racist and xenophobic political climate; and we examine how students respond to the teacher’s invitation to engage and develop their resistant capital through their writing. Data analyzed for this study include student letters, teacher interviews, and fieldnotes from one lesson, which was situated in a year-long ethnographic study. We found that the teacher cultivated resistant capital by tapping into students’ lived experiences to scrutinize oppressive rhetoric and persist in the face of adversity. Students seized the opportunity to resist the dominant anti-immigrant narrative by leveraging their resistant capital through counter-stories, assertions of experiential knowledge, and appeals to a moral imperative. Our study contributes to scholarship on CCW by exploring how CCW is utilized in a previously under-examined context and has implications for educators by offering examples of classroom practices that cultivate CCW and transform deficit discourses that threaten to impede academic success, especially among Latinx students.

Vietnam by Removes: Storytelling and Postmemory in Minh Tran Huy

Minh Tran Huy participates in the production of a second-generation Vietnamese French literature that departs from the first-generation’s autobiographical immigrant narrative. In two novels, La Princesse et le pêcheur [The Princess and the Fisherman] (2007) and Voyageur malgré lui [Travelers in Spite of Themselves] (2012), Tran Huy engages with the postmemory that interrogates war and the trauma of the French colonization of Indochina, the American military engagement during the Vietnam War and refugee displacement from Vietnam to France that parents and families experienced. Attending to Tran Huy’s position as a second-generation Vietnamese French woman writer, I argue that she (re)presents the second generation’s postmemory through the mode of storytelling. Storytelling highlights the interpersonal exchange and transmission that occurs through the spoken word between generations despite traumatic silence.

Australia

This chapter examines the development of the Arab Australian novel since its beginnings, surveying works produced in Arabic and English by three generations of Arab Australian authors. It first considers David Malouf, whose Johnno (1975) marks the beginning of the Arab Australian novel, before turning to first-generation immigrants who introduced the Arabic-language novel in the 1980s and the English-language immigrant novel in the mid-1990s. It then discusses the contribution of the second-generation Arab Australians in the literary field. It shows that the Arab Australian novel is more than just an “immigrant narrative,” or fictional “Arab voices in Diaspora,” and that all Arab Australian novelists, except for Malouf, are preoccupied with the questions of home and identity.