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Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

Migrant Sites

America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

Migrant Sites

America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

In Migrant Sites, Dalia Kandiyoti presents a compelling corrective to the traditional immigrant and melting pot story. This original and wide-ranging study embraces Jewish, European, and Chicana/o and Puerto Rican literatures of migration and diasporization through the literary works of Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Estela Portillo Trambley, Sandra Cisneros, Piri Thomas, and Ernesto Quiñonez. The author offers a transformed understanding of the ways in which the sense of place shapes migration imaginaries in U.S. writing. Place is a crucial category, one that along with race, class, and gender, has a profound impact in shaping migration and diaspora identities and storytelling. Migrant Sites highlights enclosure as a prominent sense of place and translocality as its counterpart in diaspora experiences created in fiction. Repositioning national literature as diaspora literature, the author shows that migrant legacies such as colonialism, empire, borders, containment, and enclosure are part of the American story and constitute the “diaspora sense of place.”

256 pages | 6 x 9 1/4 | © 2009

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • PLACE AND DIASPORA LITERATURE • Introduction • Reformulating Diaspora Spatialities • DIASPORIZING LOCAL COLOR AND REGIONALISM • Crossing Delancey: Jewish Diaspora Locality and U.S. Literature • Pluralism in the Immigrant Prairie: Willa Cather’s Civilized Primitives • WRITING ENCLOSURE AND TRANSLOCALITY IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA AND AFTER • “Cuando Lleguemos/When We Arrive”: The Small Town and the Poetics of Chicana/o Place • The Poetics of Aquí: Barriocentrism in Puerto Rican Diaspora Literature from Mean Streets to Neo- Noir • Conclusion • Notes • Works Cited • Index

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