Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures

In his 1994 essay “Diasporas,” James Clifford reminds us that “the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local, as a distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (qtd. in Migrant Sites, 38). This insight is central to Dalia Kandiyoti's Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures, an elegant and compelling new study that invites us to consider diaspora writing in the United States as a literature not only of displacement but also emplacement. Somewhat paradoxically, place has been neglected in the study of diaspora literatures. Deeply suspicious of territorializing metaphors, diaspora studies tends to polarize mobility and sedentarism, celebrating the former while assuming the latter to be a reactionary, conservative force. Seeking to correct this imbalance, Kandiyoti identifies place as a key modality of diaspora literatures. Her sensitive readings of a series of Jewish, Latino and other diaspora texts attest that diaspora identities are not anathema to place-based ones; instead, place emerges in her study as being as important to diaspora writing as it is to more “settled” literatures.Migrant Sites is one of several recent works to join together the insights of critical spatial studies with those of diaspora and postcolonial studies (other examples include Rita Barnard's Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writing and the Politics of Place, Elizabeth Deloughrey's Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, George Handley's New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott, and my own Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas—all published in 2007). In addition to bringing the U.S. national context into focus, Kandiyoti's most striking intervention into this discussion is her theorization of enclosure. Building on the dynamic and relational understanding of place developed by geographers such as Doreen Massey and Edward Soja, Kandiyoti examines diaspora writing in the United States that thematizes the idea of enclosure through literary topoi such as the immigrant prairie, the Jewish ghetto, the border town, and the barrio. According to Kandiyoti, diaspora narratives are shaped by experiences of spatial exclusion. “I am convinced,” she writes, “that enclosures continue to be essential to the control, abandonment and disenfranchisement of negatively racialized populations and are therefore key to the stories they tell” (32). At the same time, this sense of enclosure exists in tension with translocal and transnational connections that are constitutive of the local. The dialectic of enclosure and translocality produces a diaspora sense of place, or what Kandiyoti terms “migrant sites.”After an introduction and opening theoretical chapter that set the stage with admirable clarity and sophistication, the subsequent four chapters move chronologically from the turn of the twentieth century to the post–civil rights era and thematically across a series of diaspora literatures. Focusing on spatialized literary genres including localism, regionalism, urban writing, and barrio narratives, Kandiyoti considers works spanning roughly a century by Jewish (chap. 2), Chicana (chap. 4) and Puerto Rican diaspora (chap. 5) writers that elaborate the theme of “ethnoracialized confinement.” In addition, a chapter on Willa Cather (chap. 3) identifies the prairie writer as “the first to underline the intensely spatialized nature of the immigrant experience as foundational to not only diaspora memory but also the dominant American memory landscape” (8). In Migrant Sites, Kandiyoti discusses “white ethnic” writers such as Abraham Cahan alongside Chicana writers Estela Portillo Trambley and Sandra Cisneros and Puerto Rican diaspora writers Piri Thomas and Ernesto Quiñonez but makes only brief reference to the question of enclosure in African American and Native American writing, noting that the plantation and the reservation already have been the focus of extensive study.Kandiyoti's reflections on the challenges and possibilities of comparative and transnational methodologies are particularly salutary at a moment in which ethnic American literary studies is undergoing a comparative turn. In her introduction, she reviews critiques of traditional comparativist models and emphasizes the need to avoid both the balkanization of ethnic groups and the suppression of ethnic and national specificities. Accordingly, in the chapters that follow she is careful not to flatten differences among the diaspora literatures she considers, which she likens to “strange neighbors”—an eloquent metaphor that signals both the contiguities and asymmetries of racialization and spatial integration. While the first half of her study shows that Cahan and Cather fail to fully challenge discourses of containment and to acknowledge “other casualties of empire” such as Native Americans, the second half details how Chicano/a and Puerto Rican writers adopt localizing strategies that register the coloniality of space and sharply contest spatial disenfranchisement. Deftly balancing particularity and correspondence, Kandiyoti maintains the integrity of each of the various diaspora literatures that she examines by devoting separate chapters to each. At the same time, her final chapter suggests a certain porousness to these divisions by noting how Piri Thomas straddles the labels “Puerto Rican” and “African American” and by highlighting intersections between Jewish and Chicano treatments of urban space.It is a testament to the conceptual richness of Migrant Sites that it immediately calls up other geographical contexts in which its insights could be applied, particularly other North and South American national imaginaries in which space is similarly central and that are also informed by twinned processes of colonial expansion and containment. At the same time, Migrant Sites opens up further avenues through which to consider the relationship of diaspora literatures to spatial discourse. While Kandiyoti focuses on marginal settings associated with immigrant and racialized populations such as the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem, another line of inquiry is suggested by the chapter on Cather's treatment of the prairies, namely, how do diaspora writers reinterpret iconic “open” spaces such as the North or the West? For example, in an extension of the patterns that Kandiyoti identifies, Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007) diasporizes Alaska by converting this most open of landscapes into an oppressive space of containment, a shtetl of sorts whose displaced Jewish inhabitants are facing imminent eviction. Diasporic appropriations of iconic national landscapes such as Chabon's contest exclusionary narratives of the nation in a manner that complements the project of “barriocentric” and other localizing representations of ghettoized and enclosed spaces analyzed by Kandiyoti. Finally, an additional question arising from Kandiyoti's study is whether spaces of enclosure can carry positive as well as negative associations for the diasporic subject. A classic example of an enclosed space is the garden, a site that is “generative” of diasporic identity in Cather's writing but only at the cost of suppressing the displaced Native American presence. More recently, however, the garden has been reinterpreted by writers such as Jamaica Kincaid in more critical terms that treat it as a fertile site of diasporic emplacement while also acknowledging the diasporic subject's potential collusion in the coloniality of space.Ultimately, the most significant contribution of this timely and important study may be its recognition that the power of place has not been diminished by the forces of globalization. By the same token, if our current moment is one of increasing global flows, it is also one of intensifying mechanisms of containment. “Reading U.S. place through enclosures,” Kandiyoti maintains, “keeps us alert to the fact that the age of global flows is also the era of fences and walls and reminds us to take account of historical and ongoing immobilizations and containments of our places, interactions, and literatures” (24). Migrant Sites persuasively argues not only for the centrality of place in diaspora literatures, then, but also for the urgent need for scholars and students of diaspora writing to attend vigilantly to the ways in which “enclosure is the flipside of expansion and empire” (203).

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