Immigrant Literature

Harvard FAS

Is “immigrant literature” a useful category? In the American context, the category has facilitated an understanding of how the country’s social, political, and intellectual life has been refreshed and reshaped by immigrants. It has provided a challenge to the idea of American culture as primarily white, Anglo-Saxon, and self-contained. But the category has also been used to segregate American literature, suggesting that subcategories such as “Asian-American” or “Latinx” works of “immigrant…