Imagined countries: Nationalism and ethnicity in twentieth-century American immigration literature

This dissertation uses immigrant and first generation American writers to demonstrate that the ethnic self is no longer marginal, it is an active, intervening agent in the geographical and ideological boundaries of America. Immigration literature intersects the boundaries of American, Ethnic and Minority Literature genres and its explication and acceptance has shifted as theories of nationalism and attitudes towards the definition of American citizenship have changed. Following twentieth-century immigration patterns, literary explication of these texts has moved from American Exceptionalism and assimilation to cultural pluralism, ethnic nationalism and contemporary borderland theory which moves beyond the borders of the nation to examine the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. This study examines the literary responses to the clash that occurs between the expectations immigrants have of America and the ideological and legal narratives of the United States in their attempts to construct the narrative of a nation.; I have taken four elements traditionally associated with United States citizenship: history, opportunity, gender and language, and examined them from the centralized position of immigrant and first generation American literature. The work of the Jewish American novelists Henry Roth and Tova Reich examine the idea of history and nationalism through their relationship with the state of Israel. The American frontier concepts of economic opportunity and social mobility are themes of the poetry written by Chinese workers on the walls of the Angel Island immigration station and the novels of Gish Jen. The role of gender and visuality in the construction of national citizenship is examined within the Japanese American texts of novelist John Okada and short story writer Hisaye Yamamoto regarding the World War II internment in which their citizenship rights were revoked. Finally, the role of language in national identification is examined through Mexican American bilingual texts. This chapter examines the idea of language and citizenship in the work of short story writer Helena Maria Viramontes, poet Loma Dee Cervantes, and performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena.