A Reflection on Carpio’s Lecture: Migrant Aesthetics
A Reflection on Carpio’s Lecture: Migrant Aesthetics
By: Olivia Tencer
On April 20th, Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuk held the inaugural lecture for the Quinney-Morrison Lecture Series, titled “Migrant Aesthetics,” with Harvard Professor of English and African and African American Studies, Glenda R. Carpio. Carpio is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008), co-edited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors, and edited The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019). Carpio argued during her talk for a new paradigm for migrant fiction. Her book of the same title, forthcoming July 2023, examines several works by contemporary authors, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Julie Otsuka, and Junot Diaz, to show that migrant fiction does not have to include generic features of immigrant literature obsessed with the plot of acculturation and appealing to the reader’s empathy. Instead, these authors show how limiting empathy is as a main mode of relationality between reader and author (and/or reader and migrant). Carpio argues that these authors instead insist that their readers think and not feel, or what Hannah Arendt called “representational thinking”, that allows readers to think about their own role, their complicity, their preconceptions, and their actions in migration. While empathy may be necessary for human connection, to Carpio, it is not reliable for political action.
Carpio started her lecture by saying that “migration flows in the present connected to the past.” This temporal provocation argues that we need to understand migrant literature as narratives deeply connected to the larger socio-political and historical contexts of migration within the focus of Carpio’s work on what is now called the United States, specifically within the contexts of two massive human catastrophes: the transatlantic slave trade and the “Great Dying” of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In other words, migration is a phenomenon produced by global inequalities in which we all take part. During the talk, Carpio posed the questions: is immigrant literature useful? And useful to who? Isn’t everyone but Native peoples an immigrant in what we call America? The problem of generic immigrant or migrant literature is that it is too easily co-opted. Carpio used the term “navel gazing” to further express how narratives of American exceptionalism and multiculturalism have kept us from asking what is causing migration and how we play a role in migration.
What Carpio calls migrant aesthetics is found in the works of the contemporary authors she examines, who move away from the narrative of Americanization and acculturation and instead resist the autobiography all together, arguing that identitarian structures are limiting. These authors reject begging their reader to empathize with the migrant and consciously move away from generic immigrant literature that too often forces the migrant to be translator between the ethnic and majority group and translator of its own pain. Migrant aesthetics instead forecloses empathy as a productive tool of political action. The works Carpio examines do not aim to make their reader comfortable but instead push them to inhabit positions on migration and not persons. Carpio’s choice of authors, like Mengestu and Cole, force their readers to think about the neo-colonial contexts from which their migrants are coming from. Examples of migrant aesthetics include: strategic anonymity, collective narrative, and shifting vantage points to produce what Carpio sees as successful migrant literature. Carpio’s work at its core challenges the idea that books can make us better and more empathetic people. The contemporary authors she examines use multiple facets of migrant aesthetics like bare biographical details, the migrant dead, and illegibility to reject the generic immigrant narrative and acculturation plot.
In the introduction to Carpio’s forthcoming book, she asks the questions: “What about all the other migrants whose stories do not end in success, at least by the standards of the mythical American dream? What about all the migrants who struggle or perish? And what about the larger story about the political and economic factors that set migrants flowing in the first place?” Migrant aesthetics makes possible other forms of interaction between the reader and the text, and the “native” (settler) and the foreigner (migrant). Carpio paid homage to the works of Toni Morrison by relating migrant aesthetics to when Morrison described how African-American music “both slaps and embraces you.” Migrant aesthetics similarly slaps and embraces you by forcing you to think and not feel. The lecture ended with Carpio emphasizing that migration should be understood as a global phenomenon in which empathy alone cannot end migrant suffering, and what herself and Namwali Serpell call “The Banality of Empathy”, in conversation with Arendt, to further make the point that fiction that seeks truthfulness is more productive than those that work to create empathy. Empathy “lets readers off the hook”, giving readers the option to feel for the other without having to interrogate themselves. Migrant aesthetics instead forces the reader to interrogate themselves by exploring other possibilities of migrant fiction outside of empathy and the acculturation plot to further “guard against the commodification” of the migrant.
I look forward to reading Carpio’s book in its entirety in July to further understand what Carpio finds exemplary of these contemporary authors in their ability to use the “power of unsentimentality”. Throughout the lecture, Carpio jokingly told the audience they had “homework” to do after revealing that many of us had never engaged with the multiple texts she examined in her forthcoming book, including many written by current and past professors. I am eager to read these new book recommendations including Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names (2014), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), and Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019).