Concept: Immigrant

Definition: 

(noun)
1. a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.
2. 
a plant or animal that becomes established in an area where it was previously unknown. 

Related Terms: nonnative, foreigner, stranger, but also, permanent resident, settler, assimilation, ethnic community

Description: A term whose meanings range from naturalized citizens to immigrants whose legal status is “undocumented,” but who may have lived and worked in the country of arrival for decades, the narrative of immigrant nevertheless has specific contours. For instance, in a recent podcast (House Calls, 2023), the famed cellist Yoyo Ma and the physician and U.S. Surgeon-General, Dr. Vivek Murthy were able to evoke shared memories of their immigrant parents and the values that they embodied – of hard work, respect for elders, sacrifice, the maintenance of family ties. At the same time, attitudes to immigrants have historically been mixed, often hostile, as immigrants are seen to disrupt the social and ethnic homogeneity of established societies. In recent times, the idea of integration of minorities has been on the agenda of many western European countries where labor shortages in the post-world war II era opened the door to Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, or Syrians in Sweden. 

The intersection of the immigrant as subject and media forms that include memoir, novel, short story, and feature film is an extensive and rich field that is ever-growing. Many of these “classic” narratives are, unsurprisingly, accounts of struggle and economic survival, of the loss of language and/or identity, of intra-family conflict, and of arrival and a kind of rebirth in a new society. In the opening scene of the film, The Other Side of Hope by Finnish director, Aki Kaurismaki, the lead character, a migrant stowaway on a ship who has hidden in a coal heap, literally emerges out of invisibility into a new life. 

S.C. 2024

 

Further Readings:

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Double Occupancy Space, Place and Identity in European Cinema of the 1990s.” Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 6, November, 2006, 647–658.

Andersson, Lars Gustaf and John Sundholm. The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking: Minor Immigrant Cinemas in Sweden 1950-1990. Bristol: Intellect, 2019.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

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