Abstract
This dissertation examines contemporary fiction by writers with backgrounds in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa to show how immigrants to the US, across a range of geographical contexts, actively shape the parameters and conditions of their own belonging. The characters in these novels express an ambivalence toward the standard story of assimilation or failure, ultimately offering a more complex understanding of what it means to be an American immigrant in the twenty-first century. In particular, my research shows that in many of the fictional texts written by immigrants about the immigrant experience, characters are often defining their own relationship to the United States by questioning their names, developing new names, and ruminating on the naming traditions of their countries of origin and of their adopted cultures. A coterie of over twenty-five writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karolina Waclawiak, Valeria Luiselli, NoViolet Bulawayo, Julia Alvarez, and Anya Ulinich among others, use names to parse, document, and test cultural practices of ethnic and racial identification, thereby unsettling crude generalizations that too often inform political debates about immigration.
Thinking about names becomes a way for literary immigrants to forge their identities on their own terms, from trying to fit in, struggling to stand out, and everything in between. Across these texts, we see immigrant characters attempt to pass as other ethnicities, refuse seemingly evident solidarities, and engage in unlikely friendships and animosities across origin and migration sites. In these cases, an attention to names helps reconceptualize the American Dream from a unilateral, nationalist project to multiple avenues for immigrant futurity. My project contends that immigrants bring their own multifaceted cultural conceptions to bear on how they imagine their place within American identity. Rather than being fixed, these cultural conceptions are constantly changing. By focusing on experiments with naming in contemporary immigrant fiction, I show how immigrant literature offers us a new understanding of what American literature is and a new vocabulary for immigrant belonging in the twenty-first century.