Tag
Migration
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Jazmine Ulloa on “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory”
“We tend to see El Paso as this very narrow space that divides Mexico and the United States, but it’s this much richer region where ideas and goods and people are constantly flowing back and forth.”
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Those Refugees
While most Americans were looking forward to this past Independence Day, an ugly scene was unfolding in Murrieta, California. Patriotic citizens, armed with placards that read “America has been invaded” and “Return to Sender,” blocked buses ferrying undocumented migrants to the town’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center. This was no ordinary display of xenophobia.…
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Is She the Future of Germany?
Olga Grjasnowa’s novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (recently translated by Other Press as All Russians Love Birch Trees) was published to considerable acclaim in Germany in 2012. The book was widely celebrated for its almost documentary ability to describe the vicissitudes of a younger generation of Germans, many of multiethnic backgrounds. Belonging…
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Sweet Rage
Until the publication of the long-awaited See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s stories and novels had met with almost unqualified praise. When it appeared last year her latest book was almost unanimously trashed for what its reviewers saw as inappropriate and excessive rage directed at Kincaid’s former husband Allen Shawn. But reading the novel as a roman à clef…
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Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature course called “Good Girls, Bad Girls,” and at the time, it represented everything I sought to resist: “model minority” mythology; ethnic assimilationist imperatives; diasporic nostalgia. The Namesake had…
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Surviving the City
Once Oprah Winfrey selected Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, for her revamped Book Club, the new author garnered widespread publicity and the book quickly found its place on best-seller lists. Journalists and critics, invoking Isabel Wilkerson’s recent nonfiction book The Warmth of Other Suns, quickly claimed that Mathis’s book was about…
