ENG132

In a 2013 interview, writer Jhumpa Lahiri rejected the term “immigrant fiction" as both marginalizing and overly general: “Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction." Ceding Lahiri's point about the pitfalls of "immigrant fiction" as a genre distinction, this introductory course takes a historical approach, tracing a modern literary tradition in relation to the politics and history of U.S. immigration law, from the 1882 passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act through the so-called "Muslim Ban" of 2017. Students examine how writings by and about diverse American immigrants' experiences of assimilation and alienation variously reflect and respond to this history. In shaping conversations about American identity, post-1882 immigrant narratives also reshaped American literary history, as seen in the emergence of Asian American, Arab American, and Latinx literatures, among other traditions.