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Immigration Forum Comment: Cultural Responses to Immigration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2016

STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE
STEPHANIE LEWTHWAITE*
Affiliation:
Nottingham University. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 449 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

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4 For this image by Julio Salgado see Channing Kennedy, “Undocumented Artist Gives American Apparel's Farmer Ad a Political Twist,” Colorlines, 1 June 2015, at www.colorlines.com/articles/undocumented-artist-gives-american-apparels-farmer-ad-political-twist, accessed 10 Oct. 2015.

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13 For the latter see Josefina Báez, Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork (New York: Ay Ombe Theatre Press, 2011).

14 Salgado quoted in Seif, 307.

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16 Salgado quoted in Seif, 308.

17 Reyes quoted in García, 99.

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19 Salgado quoted in Seif, 303.

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