Recent literary expressions of the immigrant experience reveal the postmodern narrative obsession with the immigrant as cultural and political outlier. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern asks us to reimagine this preoccupation with what Junot Diaz calls the “actual flows of third world bodies” as part of a larger, more pertinent motif of the postmodern itinerant. As a figure of cultural becoming, the itinerant stands for displacement and dispersion, exceeding the confines of physical location, political subjectivity, and relation to the natural world. Thus,...
Recent literary expressions of the immigrant experience reveal the postmodern narrative obsession with the immigrant as cultural and political outlier...