Grande Recessione, finanza e promessa nel romanzo statunitense di immigrazione: The Wangs vs the World di Jade Chang e Behold the Dreamers di Imbolo Mbue
Articolo
Data di Pubblicazione:
2022
Citazione:
Grande Recessione, finanza e promessa nel romanzo statunitense di immigrazione: The Wangs vs the World di Jade Chang e Behold the Dreamers di Imbolo Mbue / C. Schiavini. - In: LINGUE CULTURE MEDIAZIONI. - ISSN 2421-0293. - 9:1(2022), pp. 141-164.
Abstract:
Besides the complexity of market structures, the 2008 financial crisis (or Great
Recession) has also testified how the representation of the crisis has often been
also the crisis of representation: largely focused on the so-called “fiction of the
Capital”, and on the white middle and upper-middle class, literature has often
been unable to transcend the limits of the traditional “neoliberal” novel and
its national(ist) perspective, and investigate the effects of the crisis on ethnic
communities, where racial discrimination has long paralleled the economic one.
The regenerative potential of the crisis in the XXI century explored by Richard
Gray (2011) and the contiguities between derivative finance and language investigated
by Appadurai (2016) are the starting point for an exploration of the
Great Recession through the immigrant/migrant eyes in two ethnic novels:
Jade Chang’s The Wangs vs the World (2016), a comic Coast-to-Coast trip eastward
bound involving a wealthy and conflictual Chinese family whose financial
ruin leads to the search for their luck back East; and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold
the Dreamers (2016), the story of a Cameroonian couple and their attempts for
a new life in New York chasing the American Dream in the shadow of the
Lehman Brothers collapse. In these two novels, the crisis is explored in relation
to the concept of the “promise”, at the core of the immigrant experience – both
in cultural and linguistic terms; and with the re-negotiations and the new forms
of transnational identities imposed by the crisis, that questions the virtual and
real value (and price) of the American Dream.
Tipologia IRIS:
01 - Articolo su periodico
Keywords:
contemporary American novel; ethnic literature; Great Recession; Imbolo Mbue; Jade Chang
Elenco autori:
C. Schiavini
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