In this course, we will study post-cold war U.S. immigrant literature. Published in a period of shifting politics, particularly for racialized migrants, these texts illuminate new iterations of what it means to be and belong in a world where capital, labor, materials, products, and people were experiencing new forms of global im/mobility. We will read a variety of diasporic fiction from a range of localities to consider the ways imperialism, colonialism, militarism, religious proselytizing, and racial capitalism are in dialogue with the murky experiences of family, desire, loss, home, mobility, culture, trauma, and belonging. In doing so, we seek to understand how macro, micro, interpersonal, and intrapsychic experiences and institutions shape migratory routes and the stories that emerge across them. We will address literature through an interdisciplinary lens by reading fiction alongside sociology, history, economics, political theory, and more in order to consider what the world of the fictive can tell us about migration that other disciplines may not be able to articulate with such emphasis and attunement as literature. |