This interdisciplinary session examines portrayals of immigrant life in the U.S. in literature and film. More specifically, this session re-casts the American imaginary through the persistent intersectionality of multilingualism, affect, and power. The presentations address the multilingual and multicultural landscape imprinted by immigrant communities and their affective attachments to the idea of the U.S. as the site of mobility and success. A sustained inquiry running through the presentations is a critical engagement with Lauran Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” Presenters adopt the term while they also question its effectiveness and offer thoughtful interventions for negotiating ideas of the U.S. as the affective multilingual destination and space of precarious belongings.

Since the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke Univ. Press, 2003), there have been a growing number of studies published on affect theory. Examples include Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (Duke Univ. Press, 2003), Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke Univ. Press, 2011), and others. Building on this existing scholarship, our session asks how multi-ethnic U.S. texts maintain, or transform or, ultimately, reject the optimistic attachments immigrants forge while always in transit and caught within the material conditions induced by legalized power(lessness) in the U.S.

To promote discussion, we have selected only three panelists who will each present for seventeen minutes, leaving time for a robust discussion between the panelists and the audience. We will begin with “In Transit: Life on the Hyphen in Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside” by Debarati Biswas. She explores the portrayal of intimacies, belonging, and networks of care that Black immigrants and asylum seekers in the U.S. forge despite the “certain uncertainty” of ever finding home either in the U.S. or in Haiti. Thinking with Stuart Hall’s framing of Blackness, as that which indexes the condition of being “perpetually unsettled,” Biswas highlights the affective possibilities of lives lived on the hyphen between English and Creole, U.S. and Haiti, Citizen and Alien, and the heteronormative and the queer in Danticat’s work. They remain forever in transit but find ways to belong through non-normative intimacies, memories of beautiful sunsets in Port-au-Prince, and detours that take them away from set paths. These modes of belonging, Biswas contends, are not forged by the affective structures that attachments to the normative idea of a ‘good life’ give rise to, but from a refusal of such optimistic attachments to the good life that the American Dream promises.

Conversely, Szidonia Haragos explores affective structures maintained through optimistic attachments to the idea of the U.S. in her paper entitled “‘What Does the Law Make You Feel?’: Affect and Power(lessness) in Arthur Vincie’s Three Trembling Cities.” Haragos studies the filmic representations of multimodal imbrications of affect, language and power in the web series of New York based American film writer and director of Hungarian decent, Arthur Vincie. Starting from Brian Massumi’s definition of affects as unqualifiable “intensity” vis-à-vis emotions as “qualified intensity,” or “the sociolinguistic fixing” of a personal life experience (2002), Haragos argues that in Vincie’s web series, the U.S., experienced through New York City, remains the object of desire perpetuating “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), a life sustaining affective attachment. Through recording the lived materiality of immigrant conditions marked by precarity, scarcity and powerlessness (one of the immigrant characters identifies “powerlessness” in the U.S. as both feeling and affect), the film registers the affective transformation of the U.S. from unqualifiable to qualified intensity through the contingency of migrant belongings.

Finally, Arthur Vincie, the writer and director of Three Trembling Cities, will reflect on the inspiration behind writing a ten-part episodic series that depicts the inner lives of immigrants who live and work in New York City. In his paper “‘Everyone is a Citizen of Three Countries:’ The Feeling of Being from Elsewhere in Three Trembling Cities,” Vincie will briefly discuss how immigrants have historically been portrayed onscreen, and how these portrayals often fail to capture the emotional, linguistic and economic complexities of immigrant life. He will also discuss the process of working with the cast, many of whom share the same ethnic and linguistic backgrounds as the characters, and with other participants in the project, to create a more nuanced understanding of the varied immigrant experiences. These include the feeling of belonging yet not belonging, the allure and the reality of the “American Dream,” finding comfort in communities, and the strategies that immigrants – especially immigrants of color – use to survive, and create, in spite of it all.