This panel focuses on current literary responses to displacement resulting from US foreign policy. Through representative works of fiction and poetry from four distinct contexts, panelists explore the effects of neocolonialism on formal innovation. Trauma, rage, and resistance through words are particularly expressed by Indigenous authors, though displacement through nuclear, military, and biological colonialization is similar to that of migrants. This “world literature” approach is key to furthering dialogue on identity in the Trump era, as policies and the attitudes they reflect erupt into a global outpouring of nationalism. Increasingly, an alternative is voiced in literary works, with corresponding innovations and experiments in form. Here, we are interested in how these trends diverge from 20th century literary responses to (post/neo)colonialization (object of significant previous scholarship, for example on magical realism). Individual situations of protagonists are viewed in their interplay with a nation’s context, in response to attacks on political and individual autonomy. Despair, longing, and cultural uncertainty take on new degrees of alienation, monstrosity, and hybridity in form; and, arguably, new degrees of power.
Importantly, we seek to question the partitions of literary study into geographical categories. Instead, in light of increasing mobility and global communication, we examine literature as a collective tool for subverting dominant world politics. This suggests a new paradigm of socially-engaged literature. Specifically, presenters engage with questions of biological, nuclear, and military colonization, as well as how these, and consequent forced displacement, effect the mental health of protagonists. They show how mental illness, rage, and overlapping displacements can translate into poignant contemporary novels and poems, existing in dialogue for the first time.
In “‘The Native Speaks of Toxins’: Demilitarization, Environmentalism, and Chamorro Resistance in Craig Santos Perez’s poetry,” Belle Kim turns to Guam—a heavily militarized island and “unincorporated territory” of the US that has been the staging area for countless US wars in the Pacific and hailed as the linchpin of the US’s force-structure strategy. It is simultaneously serving as the “dumping ground” of Vietnamese refugees, toxic, hazardous waste, and most recently, US Marine Corps personnel previously stationed in Okinawa. Focusing on Chamorro author Craig Santos Perez (whose poems excavate histories of militarized occupation, extraction, exploitation, and displacement through a strategic citation of texts like the Organic Act of Guam of 1950 and Henry Ford’s Proclamation 4347 in 1975), Kim examines how Perez’s poetry reflects the precariousness of Asian and Pacific Islander life and labor. She responds to recent calls to decontinentalize American Studies and refuse the subordination of island spaces to the continental US. She also resituates Asian racialization, labor, and resistance within a framework that foregrounds the entwined histories of US militarism in the Pacific, settler colonialism, and finance capitalism.
Shifting literary responses toward neo-colonialism in Central America, Jeffrey Peer explores the impact of US foreign policy on literary techniques and topics of local writers, in “Literature of the Caravan: Reading US Foreign Policy through Central American Literature of Migration.” While US news media obsesses over sensationalized depictions of masses of migrants arriving at border crossings, many contemporary works depict violence, insecurity, political corruption, and the effects of US neo-colonialism, through an array of literary styles, perspectives, and innovations. From magical realism to autobiography, from journalism to poetic effusions of outrage and disgust, contemporary Central American authors such as Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Claribel Alegría and Valeria Luiselli are using literature as a tool for denouncing US foreign policy in the region, through illustrating the effects of trauma, insecurity, and displacement on protagonists’ behaviors.
Thirdly, in “Displacement and Migritude: Wandering Unbelonging in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears,” Augusta Irele applies contemporary theories of globalization and “world literature” to representations of contemporary African migrants. In 2010, Shailja Patel voiced the concept of migritude (drawing on the work of the Négritude), to mean “migrants with attitude.” Migritude is a category of “migrants who speak unapologetically, fiercely, lyrically, for themselves.” These migrants interrogate extant notions of citizenship and community, situating themselves in a realm in between the political and the cultural. Grounded in recent theories on migration, globalization, and trauma, she examines melancholic unbelonging in Dinaw Mengestu’s 2007 novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. The novel’s protagonist, a political refugee from Ethiopia, wanders around Washington, D.C. in a state of melancholic liminality. Using Mengestu’s novel as an anchor, this paper argues for new approaches to reading contemporary African migrant literature that consider and center the aesthetics of melancholy in order to formulate a concept of contemporary unbelonging.
Lastly, in “‘Tear Down This Wall’: Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature” Gaura Narayana investigates how novels depicting migration (particularly of South Asians) are influenced by President's Trump immigration ban. She asserts that literature on migrancy de-transcendentalizes nationalism even when it finds itself caught in the hostile binaries of material history, such as 9/11. While literature codifies cultural memory (as Spivak suggests) and while it participates in a massive nationalist rememorative project by recording everything that the collectivity has experienced, the literature of migrancy also pushes its reader "towards the complex textuality of the international" (Nationalism and the Imagination, 21). Such literature defies the injunctions of the state, and populates host nations with cultural and racial differences. In making this move, it marks the separation between the nation and the state. It also records immigrant discomfort while recording immigrant persistence. It insists on a national picture at odds with the official narrative of the host nation, functioning not only as a call to arms, but also inaugurating a concept of nation not co-terminus with territorial boundaries.