American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity by Sonia Weiner (review)

Sonia Weiner's American Migrant Fictions (2018) is a timely, perceptive, and novel mapping of a 'poetics of migrant writing' (13). Through interwoven close readings of five novels by migrant authors in the United States, Weiner's study is a thought-provoking exploration of how "movement across physical, linguistic, and cultural borders affects formal and aesthetic innovations in the novel" (25). Building upon Salman Rushdie's and Homi Bhabha's formative works on migratory writing, along with Edward W. Soja's and Paul Gilroy's theories of space, Weiner provides comprehensive accounts of the ways linguistic playfulness and visual techniques enable American migrant authors to shed light on their highly complex experiences.

Weiner's introduction perspicuously outlines her theoretical framework and research scope, literature written by migrants to the US who arrived after the Hart-Caller Immigration Act of 1965. Weiner discusses the ways in which the novel artistic spaces that these writers create are acts of translation of cultures, languages, and family stories, as well as forms of resistance against dominant national narratives. Weiner's analyses both speak specifically to how the works she focuses on enrich American literature and can be applied to non-American migrant writers who employ visual techniques and multilingualism. Beginning with her analysis of Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon's photography-embedded novel The Lazarus Project (2008), Weiner focuses on doubles. Weiner illustrates how the double form of Hemon's novel, which includes historical and contemporary photographs and a double time-frame with events taking place at the start of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reflects Hemon's experience as a migrant. Weiner illuminates how these doubles cause the reader to move temporally between the past and the present and spatially between America and Eastern Europe. She also provides a useful means for comprehending how the incorporation of foreign languages positions the reader as being like a migrant outsider.

Weiner further discusses these themes in her chapter on G. B. Tran's Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey (2011). She explores how, like Hemon, Tran uses photographs to highlight the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, signify absences, and underscore the constructive nature of photographs. Though there are many similarities between Hemon and his narrator, Vladimir Brik, his work is fiction, whereas Tran's is a graphic memoir. As a second-generation migrant, his family's personal flight and memories are what fascinate him. Additionally, photography is only one of the visuals in Tran's work, illustrations being the other. Weiner explains that Tran's unconventional uses of the space and structure of comics express the hardships he and his family traversed. By simultaneously dismantling binaries of image/word relations and victim/perpetrator dynamics, and by using braiding and non-linearity as techniques to draw our attention to the cyclical nature of memory, Tran "transitions experience into new artistic shape" (115).

As the title of her third chapter suggests, "Shape Shifting and the Shifting of Shapes: Migration and Transformation in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)," Weiner's meditation on how migrant authors create new forms that are transformative continues and comics remain a central focus. Weiner convincingly shows that, while not a graphic novel, in Diaz's book, certain sections "function much like the frame of a comics panel: they frame a moment, an episode, in the ongoing narrative sequence" (124). Weiner's mapping of the six comics techniques that Diaz employs—namely, intertextuality, surface and depth tension, reader reliance, timing and rhythm, "braiding," and prequel—illuminates how visual-verbal relations are used in particular ways by migrants to express experiences of hybridity. Weiner explores the inside–outside dichotomy in Diaz's work through his use of two languages—English and Spanish. Diaz's full un-translated Spanish sentences position the non–Spanish-speaking reader in the sphere of an outsider.

The importance of foreign words and being between cultures has additional significance for the migrant author that Weiner considers in her fourth chapter. In...