Through Our Immigrant Eyes: Point of View and the (Re)definitions of Citizenship in Hispanic and Sinophone Literature and Film of Migration

• Author / Creator

  Velázquez Velázquez, Laura L

• We live in a historical period that has been named “the age of migration,” an epoch characterized by uncanny interconnectedness and an extended virtue of mobility, where everyone is or at least has the potential to become a migrant (Nail 14). We all move, but not all movements are the same. Some can, using a passport or the benefits granted by legal and cultural subjectivity, move in a (relatively) accessible manner; but for others, movement is impossible, unwanted, or perceived as a threat. In other words, migrant mobility carries meaning and reflects different power dynamics.
  In his book The Figure of the Migrant, the American philosopher Thomas Nail addresses this linkage between migrancy, movement, and power through the lens of kinopolitics (politics of movement). He analyzes the movement's history and how the notion has been imbued with negative connotations in political theory and practice. Nail denounces the false idea on which many migrant policies are based. While some people move, others remain static. For Nail, the opposite is true. Everybody moves, and thus, movement is neither good nor bad. What matters is how people move. While Nail offers an innovative framework to answer this pivotal question, he dangerously overlooks histories of racialization that influence perceptions of migrant mobility.
  
  Here, precisely, lies the central focus of this dissertation. I agree with Nail that all migrants move and are often subjected to manifold expulsions. However, as he notes, the way they move is different. Through Our Immigrant Eyes explores filmic and novelistic representations of different kinds of migrant mobility. The title of this dissertation refers to how the narrators of the novels Crows and La Mara and the camera lens of the films Eve and the Fire Horse, A Silent Love, Take Out, and A Better Life “see” migrant mobility and its associated cultural discourses. These accounts explore Chinese and Hispanic cultural imaginaries that shape understandings of (non-)belonging, citizenship, identity, and border crossing. By focusing on the more nuanced version of migrant mobility presented in these works, I argue for an alternative paradigm through which we can understand specific sociocultural constructions and imaginaries of migrants and their movement. In this sense, comparing Hispanic and Sinophone narratives of migration and the juxtaposition of two seemingly disparate mobility cultures offers intriguing possibilities for analysis that seek to answer the following questions: how do migrants move and why? If the meanings assigned to migrant mobility are culturally designed, does that mean that the cultural imaginaries of migrant mobility significantly vary from one culture to another? If so, how much? And how can this inform our definition and understanding of migration as a universal category? What kind of migrant mobility gets represented in the selected corpus and why? How do these migration narratives deal with legal (non-)belonging? And how do these narratives illustrate processes of (non-)citizenship production? These questions are important to ask both from a cultural studies and a narrative perspective. In addition, my work examines how the formal strategies used in these films and novels legitimize or defy those ideals. I argue that the texts discussed in this study accentuate different aspects of transnational migrant mobility. By relying on manifold points of view, the written and visual narratives discussed here emphasize distinct social tensions that shed light on how migrants’ movement, legal personae and related spatial imaginaries are culturally designed. Each distinctive use of point of view relies on different culturally imagined versions of (non)citizenship that are defined and redefined to challenge or reinforce “sedentary” ethics, privileging stasis over mobility.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Point of view
  • Chinese literature and film
  • Latin American literature and film
  • Migration
  • Citizenship

• Graduation date

  Spring 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-7key-en10

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.