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State University of New York Press - Ina C. Seethaler

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132 pages

English

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A cross-cultural, comparative study of contemporary life writing by women who migrated to the United States from Mexico, Ghana, South Korea, and Iran, Lives beyond Borders broadens and deepens critical work on immigrant life writing. Ina C. Seethaler investigates how these autobiographical texts—through genre mixing, motifs of doubling, and other techniques—challenge stereotypes, social hierarchies, and the supposed fixity of identity and lend literary support to grassroots social justice efforts. Seethaler's approach to literary analysis is both interdisciplinary and accessible. While Lives beyond Borders draws on feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability and migration studies, it also uses stories to engage and interest readers in issues related to migration and social change. In so doing, the book reevaluates the purpose, form, and audience of immigrant life writing.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading Memoirs by Immigrant Women in the United States

1. A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Migration

2. Living Like an Alien: Blackness, Migration, and Depression

3. Transnational Adoptee Life Writing: Oppressed Voices and Genre Choices

4. (Re)Negotiating the Self: Collective Memoir and Border Crossings

5. Life Narratives and the Syrian Refugee Crisis

Epilogue: The Power and Future of Immigrant Women's Life Writing

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Migration

États-Unis

United States of America

USA

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438486215
Langue	English

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LIVES BEYOND BORDERS
SUNY series in Multiethnic Literatures

Mary Jo Bona, editor
LIVES BEYOND BORDERS
US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice
Ina C. Seethaler
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Seethaler, Ina C., author
Title: Lives beyond borders : US immigrant women’s life writing, nationality, and social justice
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in multiethnic literatures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438486192 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486215 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Für Oma und Mama
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Memoirs by Immigrant Women in the United States
Chapter 1 A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Migration
Chapter 2 Living Like an Alien: Blackness, Migration, and Depression
Chapter 3 Transnational Adoptee Life Writing: Oppressed Voices and Genre Choices
Chapter 4 (Re)Negotiating the Self: Collective Memoir and Border Crossings
Chapter 5 Life Narratives and the Syrian Refugee Crisis
Epilogue The Power and Future of Immigrant Women’s Life Writing
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have completed this book without the support so many people graciously offered. First and foremost, I am grateful to my family, who nurtured my wish to become an immigrant, a state of being that made this project possible. And thank you to Mike Bezemek for our global adventures that gave me the energy to keep going.
It pains me to say that the person who first instilled in me the idea to pursue the topic for this manuscript, Georgia Johnson, is no longer with us. Getting her feedback on the final version would have meant everything. She largely shaped me into the scholar I am today. My initial writing and research also benefited tremendously from the insights and mentorship of Penny Weiss and Joya Uraizee at Saint Louis University.
Since our undergraduate studies, Pascale Cicolelli has believed in my ability to write a book. Our library days laid the foundation for this publication. Likewise, Anna Deters, Shannon Koropchak, and Amy Sattler have always offered companionship, sweets, and murder mysteries when needed. Becoming friends with Amanda Barton, Candis Bond, Michelle Parrinello-Cason, and Emily Tuttle in graduate school was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Our daily interactions, to this day, ease my anxieties and raise my self-confidence. At Coastal Carolina University, I have found my snake squad (do not ask, because I cannot explain)—Tara Craig, Franklin Ellis, Anne Ho, Jaime McCauley, Victoria Knudsen, Jenn Mokos, Jenny Schlosser, Douglas Weathers, Matt Wilkinson, and Lisa Winters—who welcomed me into their community. Kaitlin Sidorsky never refused to let me vent about finishing this project. And everyone at CCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Learning, including all my colleagues who had to hear about my writing and revision process for years during Faculty Writing Circle sessions, deserves a trophy for their patience.
Crucially, I appreciate the faith that SUNY Press, the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, and especially Rebecca Colesworthy and Mary Jo Bona have put into this book. Their expert feedback made these chapters immensely stronger.
An early version of chapter 1 appeared as “A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Immigration in Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope ” in Life Writing , vol. 12, no. 3, 2015, pp. 309–324. © Taylor Francis. Preliminary findings of chapter 3 were published as “Transnational Adoption and Life Writing: Adoptee Voices and Stylistic Choices in Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood ” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism , vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 79–98. © Indiana University Press.
INTRODUCTION
READING MEMOIRS BY IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES
Monarchs migrate. This is different than species that emigrate. Species that emigrate only travel one way. Species that migrate travel back and forth between two different places. They have two homes.
—Jane Jeong Trenka ( The Language of Blood 37)
Although love of country is required by the Prophet, / one should not live in misery / merely because one was born in a certain land
—Sa’adi (qtd. in Sattareh Farman-Farmaian, Daughter of Persia 145)
In her memoir, The Language of Blood (2003), South Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka frequently makes reference to monarch butterflies as symbols of her transnational existence. In the first of the epigraphs above, Trenka challenges the notion that immigration has a starting and an end point, instead using the notion of perpetual “two-worldliness.” Born in South Korea, raised in Minnesota, and now living again in Seoul, her ongoing negotiation of a multiplicity of homes frames many immigrant women’s life writing. 1 Lives beyond Borders is interested in how racialized and minoritized immigrant women’s rootedness in multiple spaces grows life writing as a social justice instrument that establishes a communal and relational sense of self and offers crucial intersectional insights into varying forms of multilayered oppression. 2
When Iranian writer Sattareh Farman-Farmaian references the medieval Persian poet Sa’adi in her memoir, Daughter of Persia (1992), as seen in the second epigraph above, she bravely declares that the Prophet Mohammed’s demand for devotion to one’s country of birth cannot justify having to live in “misery.” When your place of birth cannot guarantee your well-being or even survival—due to poverty, gender discrimination, or other types of oppression—then, Sa’adi claims, it is a person’s human right to migrate. I use both Trenka’s insistence on the existence of a transnational self and Farman-Farmaian’s appeal to a human right to migrate to develop a more inclusive analysis of immigrant women’s life writing.
Due to its long history as a tool of resistance for minoritized communities, life writing provides a fruitful foundation for crucial discussions about migration, intersectionality, and social justice. 3 According to Gillian Whitlock, “autobiography is fundamental to the struggle for recognition among individuals and groups, to the constant creation of what it means to be human and the rights that fall from that, and to the ongoing negotiation of imaginary boundaries between ourselves and others” ( Soft Weapons 10). To this humanizing effect, Eva Karpinski adds a special focus on immigrant women by stating that “writing as an immigrant woman in the genre of autobiography means writing both in a borrowed tongue and in a borrowed genre—grappling with a legacy of (or indebtedness to?) inherited models of androcentric or mainstream autobiographical representation” ( Borrowed 2). Like Karpinski, I am intrigued by how “women have consistently attempted to rewrite and remake autobiography, by ‘translating’ the traditional project of autobiography into new forms and theories of self-representation” ( Borrowed 13).
Lives beyond Borders seeks to establish that immigrant women’s life writing not only modifies literary norms but also has the potential to change cultural and social perceptions that shape traditions, laws, and understandings of nationality and social justice. Such changes might be especially called for in a political climate that, in 2019, empowered the then President of the United States to admonish four female U.S. citizen lawmakers of color to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” (Rogers and Fandos), and when an unprecedented number of arrests of nonviolent undocumented migrants were made under said president’s administration (Gomez). In this light, life writing matters because, as Elsa Lechner optimistically asserts, “through life narrative … we might get closer to each other and build a common history of peace and respect, regardless of eventual and sometimes radical personal differences” (637).
This book employs Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s definition of life writing as an “umbrella term that encompasses the extensive array and diverse modes of personal storytelling that takes experiential history as its starting point” (7–8). While autobiography is often considered the more sophisticated and literary subcategory of life writing, memoir has established itself as a popular format. According to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, memoir “directs attention more toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator” ( Reading 198). Whitlock calls it “a form of self-reflective writing that is personal, often conversational, and a meditation about the place of the self in history” ( Weapons 20). And G. Thomas Couser adds that memoir “has been a threshold genre in which some previously silent populations have been given voice for the first time” ( Memoir 12). It might not come as a surprise then that publication of memoirs has increased 400 percent between 2004 and 2008 and that, as Ben Yagoda surmises, memo