Lives beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women’s Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler (review)

Reviewed by: Lives beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice by Ina C. Seethaler Lingfeng Nie Ina C. Seethaler. Lives beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice. State U of New York P, 2021. x + 221 pp. Based on white men's experiences, the traditional immigrant life narratives have presented "assimilation as a central trope" (6). Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the male autobiographical subject, Ina C. Seethaler's engaging Lives beyond Borders: US Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice foregrounds the stories of women, more specifically those of racially minoritized women, investigating how ethnic female immigrants employ the genre of life writing to challenge prevailing notions of nationality and advocate for social justice. To this end, Seethaler innovatively designs an interdisciplinary (combining migration studies, women's and gender studies, disability studies, as well as literary and cultural studies), transnational (involving immigrants from Mexico, Ghana, South Korea, Iran, Vietnam, and Syria), and intersectional (examining how the connections between gender, race, religion, nationality, level of ability, socioeconomic level, and migration status affect immigrant women's experiences of oppression and injustice) project. This study is divided into five chapters, along with an introduction and epilogue. The Introduction to Lives beyond Borders provides an overview of immigrant life writing theory, expounds on how life writing is related to nationality and social justice, and emphasizes the importance of intersectional analysis of immigrant life writing. The following chapters discuss six compelling case studies of life narratives, all of which expand the generic boundaries of life writing and subvert "master narratives of belonging and identity" (21). Chapter 1, titled "A Genre for Justice: Life Writing and Undocumented Migration," is particularly attentive to the Mexican undocumented immigrant Rosalina Rosay's Journey of Hope (2007). According to Seethaler, because of Rosay's insertion of elements of "testimonio and métis" (35) into her memoir, it can be understood as a trickster text: beneath the surface of Rosay's affection for and gratitude to the US lies her revolt against the systemic oppression of sexism, colorism, and classism, as well as her call for social justice. In the next chapter, focusing primarily on Willow Weep for Me (1998) produced by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, a female African migrant to the United States, Seethaler first elaborates on Danquah's position as an alien, rendered by her Blackness, femaleness, and immigration status in addition to her clinical depression; subsequently, she explores how Danquah [End Page 191] mixes genres—"memoir, biography, self-help book, reference book" (60)—to increase her social visibility and empower herself. Furthering the generic experiment conducted by Danquah, Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka in The Language of Blood (2003), as Seethaler argues in chapter 3, modifies the subgenre of adoptee life writing to include such stylistic elements as plays, fairy tales, myths, letters, and crossword puzzles, to give voice to transnational adoptees as well as poor birthmothers and have "their communities' humanity and dignity recognized" (90). The Iranian immigrant Nahid Rachlin and her memoir Persian Girls (2006) are the focus of chapter 4. Through the generic deviation from life writing—incorporating letters, short stories, poems, song lyrics, and imagined episodes— Rachlin, in Seethaler's understanding, creates a collective memoir, presenting herself as "part of a global community of women" (125) who are subject to the "intersectional forces of gender, religion, class, and nationality." Drawing connections to life writing texts in the previous four chapters and shifting the analytical model from examining one writer and one memoir, chapter 5 centers on two refugee texts: Vietnamese refugee Thanhhà Lȧi's Inside Out and Back Again (2011) and Syrian refugee Bana al-Abed's Dear World: A Syrian Girl's Story of War and Plea for Peace (2017). Telling stories from the perspectives of children and young adults, the two life narratives shed light on displaced people's experiences of sexual violence, dehumanization, "political power, sovereignty, and bio politics [sic]" (33). The study closes with an epilogue, in which the implications of the project for immigration policy and practice regarding economy, politics, and sociology are addressed, and a positive note is struck in relation to the...

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