Immigrant And Ethnic-Minority Writers Since 1945. Fourteen National Contexts In Europe And Beyond

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Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority
Writers since 1945
Fourteen National Contexts in Europe and Beyond
Edited by
Wiebke Sievers
Sandra Vlasta
leiden | boston

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Contents
Preface vii
List of Contributors x
Introduction 1
Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta
1 From White Australia to the Asian Century: Literature and Migration in
Australia 9
Sneja Gunew and Wenche Ommundsen
2 New Austria, Old Roots: Writers of Immigrant Origin in Austria 43
Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta
3 Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing in Brazilian Literature:
A Fundamental Presence 77
Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida and Maria Zilda Ferreira Cury
4 Encountering Canada: Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing 106
Christl Verduyn
5 A Belated Arrival: Flemish Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing 151
Sarah De Mul
6 Somewhere Between ‘French’ and ‘Francophone’: Immigrant and Ethnic-
Minority Writing in France 172
Laura Reeck
7 From the Exclusion of Individual Authors to the Transnationalisation
of the Literary Field: Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writing in
Germany 219
Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta
8 Learning New Languages: A Literature of Migration in Greece 259
Maria Oikonomou

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vi Contents
9 The Politics of Changing National Identity: Migration Literature in
Italy 288
Marie Orton
10 Challenging the Myth of Homogeneity: Immigrant Writing in
Japan 318
Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt
11 Oscillating between Margin and Centre: Dutch Literature of
Migration 355
Liesbeth Minnaard
12 The Faces of a New Transnational Swiss Nation 388
Daniel Rothenbühler, Bettina Spoerri and Martina Kamm
13 From Commonwealth Literature to Black and Asian British Writers:
The Long History of Migration and Literature in the United
Kingdom 429
Sandra Vlasta and Dave Gunning
14 Immigration and the United States: Immigrant Writing and Ethnic
American Literature 463
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Conclusion: How Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writers Have
Become a Vanguard of Cultural Change: Comparing Historical
Developments, Political Changes and Literary Debates in Fifteen
National Contexts 499
Wiebke Sievers
Index 519

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004363�43_00�
Introduction
Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta
Abstract
This volume studies immigrant and ethnic-minority writers in fourteen national con-
texts from a comparative perspective. When literary scholars historicise immigrant
and ethnic-minority writing in their respective national contexts, they usually only
focus on how this writing has become visible and how it has come to challenge the re-
spective national literatures; they rarely tell us why this writing has remained invisible
for such a long time in many of the contexts discussed here. Yet, as soon as we move
beyond national contexts, this is the first question which comes to mind: How can we
explain these differences, especially between countries that have very similar immi-
gration histories? With this question in mind, we developed a comparative framework
that would bring to light both of these perspectives in each chapter. The introduction
serves to explain this framework as well as the selection of countries included in this
volume.
This book studies immigrant and ethnic-minority writers in fourteen national
contextsfromacomparativeperspective.1Ouranalysisstartsfromnationalcon-
texts because we are particularly interested in how, and how far, these writers –
who arrived in the host country as immigrants or are the descendants of
immigrants – have managed to question national cultures, identities and lit-
eratures, and in whether these processes vary across national contexts. We
selected a diverse sample of contexts for our comparison, including classi-
cal immigration countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States,
countries where immigration became an issue after World War ii – such
as France and Germany – and countries that have only become countries
of immigration in the last two decades, such as Italy and Greece. We have
1 Although Flanders is not a nation-state, the strong nationalism characterising this region
justifies its categorisation as a national literary context in no way related to Francophone
Belgium, but strongly dependent on the Dutch literary field.This also becomes evident in the
fact that we could not identify a single expert willing to write a chapter on both the Flemish
and the Francophone regions of Belgium.

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Sievers and Vlasta
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also included countries rarely discussed in this field of study, such as Brazil
and Japan.2 This seemingly Westernised, if not Eurocentric, sample has not
resulted from a Eurocentric approach but from empirical reality. This does not
mean that there is no migration in other countries. On the contrary, while large
numbers of immigrants live inWestern countries such as the United States and
Germany, this also holds true for countries not included in our study, such as
the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Migra-
tion, however, does not necessarily result in the emergence of an immigrant or
ethnic-minority literature, as shown with labour migration in Austria and the
Netherlands compared to Germany (Minnaard 2011; Sievers 2008). This is due
partly to the limited cultural and social capital of the immigrants and partly
to the closed structures of the literary fields in their host countries. These fac-
tors may also serve to explain why we have not been able to identify any re-
searchers working on writers of immigrant origin in Russia, Saudi Arabia or the
Arab Emirates. Indeed, the fact that, in Japan and Brazil, there are so few schol-
ars working on this topic demonstrates how relatively new and marginal it is
in these two contexts.
Unlike many other publications in this field, we do not intend to develop
new concepts for describing immigrant and ethnic-minorty writers and their
works, or for grasping the specific inbetweenness of their writing in a liter-
ary world that has generally become more international over recent decades.
This does not mean that the individual chapters do not raise these issues. They
provide information on the most important writers and their works in the
respectivenationalcontext.Theyhighlighthowthegroupsof writersdiscussed
have changed over time; how those initially regarded as strangers – such as
Eastern European Jewish immigrants who fled to the United States in the early
twentieth century – or those who have fallen into oblivion – such as Italian
migrants to Germany in the 1960s – have melted into the national imaginary,
and how others – such as Asian writers in the United States andTurkish writers
in Germany – have taken their place. They also explain how the interpretation
of these writers has changed in many contexts – from them being regarded as
representatives of their countries of origin or ethnic groups to them being dis-
cussed as a vanguard questioning the idea of homogeneous ethnic and cultural
2 The project also contained a chapter on Sweden written by Satu Gröndhal. However, for per-
sonal reasons, this chapter could not be completed for this publication.We will, nevertheless,
include the case in our introduction and conclusion. The developments in Sweden differ so
much from all other contexts discussed here that we feel they should also be mentioned in
our volume.

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INTRODUCTION
identities. Nevertheless, the focus is not on the writers as such, but on how the
context in which these writers have become known has influenced their emer-
gence, recognition and interpretation.
The fourteen chapters in this volume tell us how immigrant and ethnic-
minority writers have fought for recognition, have challenged the understand-
ing of national literatures and have markedly changed these in some contexts.
They have been the most successful in reaching this aim in the Anglophone
world, where authors such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje or Maxine
Hong Kingston have not only become an integral part of national literatures,
buthavealmostcometorepresentthem.Whileimmigrantandethnic-minority
writers have certainly not reached this stage in all fourteen contexts discussed
here, they have clearly become more visible over the last three decades. In fact,
the growing visibility of these writers in other countries seems to have moti-
vated Flemish literary institutions, amongst others, to support the emergence
of such writers in the Flemish literary landscape, where no immigrant writ-
ing existed before the turn of the century. As Sarah de Mul stated at our pre-
paratory workshop for this book project, it almost seemed as though Flemish
literature could not be regarded as a fully-fledged literature at the beginning
of the twenty-first century unless it also included publications by immigrant
and ethnic-minority writers. This example clearly shows that these authors
have challenged our understanding of national literatures as monolingual and
monocultural, to the extent that such a homogenous view is now considered
unnatural, even in contexts where no such writers have emerged.
At the same time, this book also explains how the challenge these writers
pose to national literatures has been contained in some national contexts. It
tells us about the ideologies and institutions that have prevented immigrant
writing from being recognised. The most impressive example of such national
containment is France, where the strict distinction between French writers
in France and Francophone writers of the former colonies has kept in check
the challenge these writers pose to French culture and literature. Such strong
ideologies make it difficult to name, let alone discuss, immigrant and ethnic-
minoritywriterswho,inthisexample,weremainlycategorisedasFrancophone
writers even if they were born in France or had resided there for most of their
lives. Such ideological barriers explain why the first research on these writers
often emerged outside the national contexts within which they wrote.The only
exceptions to this rule are the classic immigration countries and those coun-
tries where a pointed questioning of cultures took place in other areas – such
as in the field of postcolonial studies in the uk – or where literary research
institutions emerged that adopted a new approach to the study of national
literature, as in Germany.

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The fourteen chapters in this volume highlight the fact that the stories of
challenge and containment vary massively between the countries discussed
here. They sometimes also differ within these national contexts. This particu-
larly holds true for those nation-states that consist of several recognised of-
ficial language communities (i.e. Belgium, Canada and Switzerland). However,
when literary scholars historicise immigrant and ethnic-minority writing in
their respective national contexts, they usually only focus on how this writing
has become visible and how it has come to challenge the respective national
literatures, whereas they rarely tell us why this writing has remained invisible
for such a long time in many of the contexts discussed here. Yet, as soon as we
move beyond national contexts, this is the first question which comes to mind:
How can we explain these differences, especially between countries – such as
Canada and Australia, Britain and France or Germany and Austria – that have
very similar immigration histories.
With this question in mind, we developed a comparative framework that
would bring to light both of these perspectives in each chapter. We provided a
working definition of the word immigrant, a definition not stemming from any
of the contexts discussed in the volume, but allowing each of the contributors
to take a step back from their national contexts and to rethink these through
this new lens. We decided to use the definition of a long-term immigrant, as
devised by the United Nations: ‘A person who moves to a country other than
that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year (twelve months),
so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country
of usual residence’ (United Nations 1998: 18). Hence, our volume focuses on all
writers of immigrant origin – in the sense of the un definition of a long-term
immigrant – in the respective national contexts, as well as on writers who are
the descendants of such immigrants.
Such a definition may seem outdated at a time when literary studies tends
to move beyond biographical concepts to describe these writers and anal-
yse their works. It may also seem very constricting when compared to the
many concepts that have emerged from the literary analyses of immigrant
and ethnic-minority writing. These authors have been described as hybrid
(Bhabha 1994), transnational (Seyhan 2001), cosmopolitan (Cheesman 2007)
or nomadic (Harrington 2013) in order to stress the fact that they question our
usual understanding of nations, cultures and belonging. However, our working
definition for this volume is not meant to add to this discussion. It is mere-
ly a heuristic tool that guarantees that we are comparing like for like across
the different national contexts. This is necessary because immigration means
so many different things in the fourteen contexts discussed here and these
meanings also influence the way in which literature is perceived. In Germany,

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INTRODUCTION
for example, immigration has mainly come to mean Turkish immigration in
public discussions of this phenomenon, at least until 2015 when a large num-
ber of refugees entered the country. Similarly, literary analyses have, over the
years, increasingly focused on Turkish-German writing – while largely ignor-
ing African-German writing, for example, or the literature written by ethnic
Germans originating from Russia. These latter are not defined as immigrants
in German official concepts of immigration, though they would be regarded as
such under the un definition. In the Dutch context, on the other hand, discus-
sions of immigrant and ethnic-minority writing have tended to focus on labour
immigrants and their descendants only, while colonial and post-colonial immi-
grants and their descendants were discussed in the framework of post-colonial
literatures. Our working definition is designed to highlight these blind spots in
literary analyses of the writing of immigrants and their descendants in each
of these national contexts. At the same time, we intend to make visible the
long history of this writing which is not perceived as such. Again, France is the
most striking example. A large number of writers have moved to France from
the former colonies since the end of World War ii, but they are still perceived
as Algerian, Moroccan etc., whereas authors such as Samuel Beckett or Eugène
Ionesco were simply integrated into the national canon without further dis-
cussion of the fact that they had come to France as immigrants.
In addition to defining our field, the un definition also serves as a foil for
defining the concepts that have emerged from the literary study of immigrant
and ethnic-minority writing in the national contexts under discussion in this
volume. It is a reference point for explaining who is included and excluded in
the respective terminology used. Moreover, in many of the national contexts
the term ‘immigration’ is no longer in use in literary studies because of the neg-
ative connotations it has acquired over the course of time. While early immi-
grant writers were often also described as such (or as foreigners or migrants),
the negative images associated with these terms have led to their replacement
by new concepts in almost all cases presented here. However, immigration was
the starting point for all the literatures discussed in this volume, even if it is no
longer visible in current definitions of the field – such as minoritised writing in
Canada, for example. It may be easiest, in fact, to return to this initial moment
from the neutral perspective of a un definition.
Last but not least, we also intended to clearly distinguish immigrants and
their descendants from other minorities in the respective contexts, such as in-
digenous peoples – including Aborigines in Australia and American Indians
in the United States – and autochthonous national or ethnic minorities, such
as Slovenes in Austria. However, our workshop has shown that these differ-
ent groups are not as clearly distinguishable in many of the contexts as we

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originally thought. Sometimes immigrants entered a context where offi-
cially recognised minorities already existed, such as the Slovenes in Austria.
Although the newcomers have usually been discussed as writers of immigrant
origin, they were often anthologised and studied together with writers stem-
ming from these recognised minorities who suffer from similar exclusion de-
spite the fact that Austrian legislation granted specific rights to them after
World War ii. In the United States, the Black Civil Rights Movement has been
of major importance for the recognition of writers of immigrant origin while
the indigenous peoples of Canada, usually referred to as First Nations, have
profited enormously from the recognition of immigrants and their descen-
dants as writers since the 1980s. Such links are highlighted whenever they are
deemed important for the respective context. However, the chapters do not
specifically discuss the literatures written by autochthonous minorities in de-
tail as these are not intended to be our main focus.
It would be virtually impossible to recount the complete history of immi-
grant and ethnic-minority writing in the wider sense of the un definition in
many of the chapters in this volume. This holds particularly true for Australia,
Brazil, Canada and the United States, where almost all writing would fall into
this category except for the texts written by indigenous people. However, we
also did not want our authors to relate the whole history of immigrant and
ethnic-minority writing in this sense. As mentioned above, we wanted them
to explain when and why this literature began to pose a challenge to national
literatures. It is therefore this particular dimension that is discussed in more
depth in the individual chapters, which means that the main body of the text
in most chapters focuses on the literary debates about immigrant and ethnic-
minority writing since the 1980s. Writers of immigrant origin may have been
discussed before that date, but this was often in the context of their coun-
tries of origin (i.e. as Caribbean or Indian writers in the United Kingdom or
as Francophone Algerian writers in France). Even if they were discussed as
immigrantwriters,ashasbeenthecaseintheUnitedStatessincethebeginning
of the twentieth century, they were mainly read as describing the integration
of new immigrants into the American melting pot rather than as challenging
such ideas. Such early debates, where they exist, are included in the first sec-
tion of each chapter, without describing them in as much detail as the ap-
proaches developed after 1980. However, in many contexts, this is not an issue
at all, since the first literary studies on immigrant and ethnic-minority writers
only emerged in the 1990s (see France and the Netherlands) or even later (see
Austria and Flanders). The initial cut-off point for the chapters was 2012 when
first drafts of the chapters were discussed in Vienna. Although all authors have
tried to include the most relevant recent developments, the chapters have not

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INTRODUCTION
been systematically updated to discuss all research published up to the pres-
ent day. Especially in those contexts where the authors covered thirty years
of research on immigrant and ethnic-minority writing, an update would have
meant a lot of extra effort without yielding major new insights.
Apart from the working definition, we also provided our country experts
with an outline for their chapters in order to facilitate comparison between
the national contexts. All chapters are therefore structured along similar lines.
They start with an introduction which provides general information on the
respective national context and helps to explain the very specific trajectory
which immigrant and ethnic-minority writing and the study of this writing
have taken. This may include information on ideologies governing the field
(such as multiculturalism in Australia, Canada and the us) or hampering
its emergence (such as la Francophonie and republicanism in France). An-
other important factor may be the structure of the literary field, such as its
dependence on another major literary field (as in Switzerland with regard to
Germany, France and Italy) or the importance of specific genres (such as work-
ers’ literature in Germany). Last but not least, the authors may highlight speci-
ficities in the field of literary studies in their particular context (such as the
focus on the literary past rather than contemporary literature and the resulting
ignorance of immigrant and ethnic-minority writing in many contexts).
The next section of each chapter, entitled ‘Historical background and devel-
opment of the field’, describes when and how immigrant and ethnic-minority
writing and the study of it first emerged in the respective national context. Of
particular interest in this section are the organisations and instruments that
facilitated the emergence of both this writing and the literary study of it. This
may include journalists, critics, publishers and a variety of civil organisations
establishing writing laboratories and competitions, resulting in anthologies
or founding publication series and online journals in the first case, and new
institutions for the study of literature and specific conferences in the second.
This is followed by a section on data collection, though only in certain chap-
ters since, in contexts such as Australia and Italy, the gathering and archiving
of immigrant and ethnic-minority writing has been a major part of the work
done within literary studies thus far. Often this has also resulted in the edition
of bibliographical works and anthologies as the first instruments of canonisa-
tion of this writing.
The subsequent section, which constitutes the main body of the text in
most chapters in this volume, is devoted to descriptions of how literary studies
have interpreted individual texts written by immigrants and their descendants
in the respective national context over the course of the last thirty years. It
describes the different approaches taken and related concepts used to read

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these writers, explains how these approaches have changed over time (if they
have not emerged simultaneously, as is the case in many countries where im-
migrant and ethnic-minority writing is a recent phenomenon) and illustrates
how these changes were linked to new readings of existing authors or first
readings of new authors. All chapters close with an evaluation of the impact
of immigrant and ethnic-minority writing and the literary study of it in the re-
spective national context. This section, on the one hand, answers the question
of whether immigrant and ethnic-minority writing has brought about change,
be that in the political or in the literary sphere. On the other hand, it discusses
whether the study of this literature has led to a more general change in literary
studies.This may include a new understanding of literature no longer regarded
as monocultural or monolingual as well as re-readings of well-established au-
thors in the light of these new developments. Finally, this section serves to
highlight gaps in the research and to chart possible future developments in
the field.
The conclusion summarises and compares the findings of the individual
chapters and thus highlights the differences and similarities in the processes
of emergence and recognition of immigrant and ethnic-minority writers.
References
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Seyhan, A. (2001) Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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