American Migrant Fictions ― Space, Narrative, Identity

This volume analyzes the work of five American migrant writers and one photographer of the late 20th and 21st centuries--Aleksandar Hemon, G.B. Tran, Junot Díaz, Boris Fishman, Velibor Bozovic, and Vikram Chandra--to show how cultural encounters informed by migrants can shape experience and its representation. It focuses on their attention to form and space, as the authors inhabit a space located between cultures, languages, and national borders, one characterized by fluidity, mobility, and dislocation, and experience a shared conception of space-time as non-homogenous, nonlinear, and non-chronological. It demonstrates how they portray time and space in relation to migration through the form and structure of the novel, through spatial constructs and narrative techniques that disrupt temporal linearity and introduce spatiality, looking at Hemon’s Lazarus Project and photos by Bozovic in it, Tran’s graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Fishman’s A Replacement Life, and Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Annotation ©2018 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Sonia Weiner. Ph.D. (2007), Tel Aviv University, is a lecturer in American Literature at that university. She has published articles on migrant fiction and African American literature, and has writer the prefaces for several Hebrew translations of American literary texts.