Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Battat Erin Royston 
Published: August 2008

Author's Introduction

Migration has shaped the physical, cultural, and literary landscape of what is now the United States from the transcontinental movements of indigenous peoples, to the arrival of Europeans, westward expansion, and the urban migrations of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. In the past century, stories of transnational and internal migration helped to define the modern American city; the concepts of race, region, and ethnicity; and a changing national identity. These stories both influenced and were influenced by the burgeoning fields of social science, which attempted to explain the vast changes associated with immigration and urbanization. ‘Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century’ traces the relationship between literature and social scientific thought, focusing on African American, southern white, and Chicano narratives of movement within the United States. As teaching tools, these stories of internal migration can be situated within a larger curricular framework that draws upon transnational narratives and that explores questions of mythological archetypes, ethnic modernism, and multiculturalism.

Author Recommends:

Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993).

This work of interdisciplinary cultural criticism examines the intersections of urban literature and urban sociology in Chicago at mid‐century. Focusing on Chicago novelists James Farrell (Studs Lonigan), Nelson Algren (Never Come Morning), and Richard Wright (Black Boy/American Hunger), Cappetti challenges the critical marginalization of these writers and their social protest mode. She redefines the category of literary naturalism by showing how these writers used sociology as a vernacular source and as a window into the urban slum. Through adept close readings of the novels and the published and archival writings of Chicago School sociologists such as Robert Park, William I. Thomas, and Louis Wirth, Cappetti probes the tension between the progressive ideas of multiculturalism and the pathological model for understanding migration, social deviancy, and urban unrest.

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Verso, 1997). See especially Chapter 7: ‘Grapes of Wrath: “The Art and Science of Migratin”’.

In this encyclopedic survey of the cultural wing of the Popular Front, Denning argues for the enduring influence of this Depression‐era movement through what he calls the ‘laboring of American culture’ (xvi). Denning defines the Popular Front as a social‐democratic movement based on anti‐fascism, anti‐lynching, and industrial unionism, and he finds evidence of its aesthetic in postwar mass culture industries such as film and television. Immigrants and southern migrants, as well as the autobiographical narratives they created, were at the heart of this cultural transformation, Denning argues. Chapter 7 examines the shift from the representation of the migration experience through the ‘grapes of wrath’ story codified by John Steinbeck, to the self‐representation of migrants and migrant workers in autobiographical writings by Woody Guthrie, Carlos Bulosan, and Ernesto Galarza.

James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

In this groundbreaking work of social history, Gregory traces the migrations of both black and white southerners in the twentieth century. Focusing on the categories of employment, housing, religion, and popular culture, he analyzes both the congruencies and divergences in their experiences. Gregory's findings belie the negative stereotype of the maladjusted migrant, which was widely disseminated by sociological theory and the mass media, and suggest that migration was by‐and‐large a successful endeavor for both black and white Americans. However, he is careful to document how white migrants reaped the benefits of racial privilege while black migrants faced discriminatory practices in northern cities. This is an excellent overview of black and white migration that combines census data, quantitative research, oral history interviews, and media analysis, and that takes a novel comparative approach.

Farrah Griffin, ‘Who Set You Flowin’?’: The African‐American Migration Narrative (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Griffin examines the literature, images, and music of the African American Great Migration, organizing her study into four key moments in the migration journey: reasons for leaving, the urban encounter, the creation of ‘safe spaces’ in the city, and visions of new possibilities. Offering readings from a wide array of texts, Griffin traces the development of the genre over time, from the ‘urban pathology’ model for understanding migrant problems early in the century to the celebration of African American communities and their shared southern origins in the postwar era. A great introduction to the voluminous literature of African American migration, this book includes both canonical and obscure works, and places them in a coherent historical and theoretical framework.

Mark Andrew Huddle, ‘Exodus from the South’, in Alton Hornsby (ed.), A Companion to African American History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

This historiographical essay traces African American migration scholarship in the twentieth century, from sociological studies early in the century by pioneers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Johnson, to synthetic histories at mid‐century focusing on race relations, to social histories and community studies of the 1970s and 1980s, to more recent diasporic approaches. In general, scholars have shifted away from associating migration with urban problems and have come to view it as a historical process with migrants themselves as the primary agents of change. Huddle's essay offers a wide survey of the field and is a great starting point for students doing research on the subject.

David R. Maciel and Maria Herrera‐Sobek (eds.), Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1998).

This collection of essays illuminates the cultural dimension of Mexican immigration to the United States, including analyses of migrant autobiographies, novels, films, humor, and ballads. The editors’ introduction includes a useful historiographical essay on Mexican immigration in the twentieth century.

Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

In his study of the novels of the African American Great Migration, Rodgers situates this prevalent literary theme into a historical and thematic framework. Chapters proceed chronologically, each analyzing a pair of novels that are thematically linked. Paul Laurence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex‐Coloured Man establish the geographic and character prototypes early in the century, while Jean Toomer's Cane and Nella Larsen's Quicksand represent the contributions of the Harlem Renaissance to migration literature. The form comes into full flower in the Depression era, with Richard Wright's Native Son and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge exploring the figure of the ‘fugitive migrant’. Rodgers brings us into the postwar period with analysis of the ‘communal migrant’ in Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This book offers a useful model for framing a course on African American migration literature, and is a useful starting point for student research.

George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993).

A seminal history of Mexican American identity formation, Becoming Mexican American argues that this ethnic culture was not inherited from Mexico, but rather forged in a new American context. This history begins with the migrants’ racially and ethnically diverse origins in Mexico, and the socio‐economic and political upheavals that followed the Mexican Revolution in 1910, spurring mass migrations into the United States. Sanchez examines how Mexican migrants constructed their own culture in California through local networks, the invention of traditions, political activism, and interactions with American mass culture.

Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Sollors turns to ethnic literature – autobiographies, novels, plays, periodical literature, etc. – to examine how people from a variety of backgrounds came to see themselves as ‘Americans’ while shaping the way we understand ethnic difference. His theory of group identity, based on the conflict between ‘consent’ (self‐made status) and ‘descent’ (inherited privilege), sheds light on the ideological struggles at the heart of American democracy, and is widely used in American cultural criticism. This book offers penetrating close readings of tales of exodus, rebirth, melting pots, intermarriage, and jeremiads, interpreting them as cultural codes to what it means to be American.

Werner Sollors, ‘Ethnic Modernism’, in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 6, Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Coining a phrase commonly used in American cultural criticism, Sollors argues in ‘Ethnic Modernism’ that immigrants, children of immigrants, African Americans, and members of other marginalized groups significantly advanced modern art, music, literature, and culture in the United States in the twentieth century. These writers and artists helped to counteract the vehement anti‐modernism that prevailed in the U.S. before World War II, and to remake American art and literature as truly cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and appreciated worldwide.

Online Materials:

America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black‐and‐White Photographs from the FSA‐OWI, 1935–1945. American Memory, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html

This site contains more than 100,000 digital photographs from the Farm Security Administration‐Office of War Information photography projects. During the Depression and World War II, the federal government hired professional photographers to document the people, places, and projects served by these agencies, resulting in an incredibly varied portrait of America at that time. The database is keyword searchable, and contains thousands of images of migrants and migrant camps.

Immigration. American Memory, Library of Congress.

http://international.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/introduction.html

Created by the Library of Congress, this teaching tool features multi‐media presentations on ten major immigrant groups in the United States and Native Americans. Each section contains a historical essay, interactive maps, and a timeline. Other resources include links to the Library's online collections, links to lessons and Web resources, bibliographies, and guides to images and sound clips. The groups represented are Native American, African, German, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Puerto Rican/Cuba, and Polish/Russian.

In Motion: The African American Migration Experience. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

http://www.inmotionaame.org

Created by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this superb Web site features 13 migrations that have shaped African American experience in the United States. Each of the 13 units contains a historical essay, around 100 illustrations, dozens of research resources, maps, lesson plans, a bibliography, and a list of related websites. Containing 16,500 pages of text, over 8000 illustrations, and more than 60 maps, this site is useful for students and more experienced researchers alike.

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull‐House and its Neighborhoods, 1889–1963. University of Illinois at Chicago.

http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp/introduction/introduction.htm

Part of an on‐going research project at the University of Illinois, this site contains nearly 1000 texts relating to Jane Addams, including letters; newspaper, magazine, and journal articles; personal writings; maps; and images. These resources give students access to Hull House and the settlement house movement of which it was part, as well as the to immigrant communities of its urban Chicago neighborhood.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940–41. American Memory, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html

This Web site is an online collection of the ethnographic field work of Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, who were employed by the Library of Congress from 1940 to 1941 to document the Farm Security Administration camps in California. These camps provided temporary shelter and relief for migratory workers, many of whom had fled the dust bowl region of Oklahoma. This collection contains recordings of migrant songs and interviews, photographs, camp newspapers, and other manuscript materials.

Sample Syllabus:

American Migration Narratives: Migration, Ethnicity, and American Identity

Migration experiences and stories are fundamental to American cultural life, from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island, from the intrepid pioneer to the displaced sharecropper, from the assimilationist ‘melting pot’ to the pluralistic ‘nation of nations’. Many different cultural groups within the United States have used migration narratives as a means to establish themselves as Americans, or to maintain their distinctive cultural identities in the face of mass culture, Americanization efforts, and other forces of assimilation. This course begins with a unit that examines several archetypal myths that have given shape to American migration narratives: the exodus story, the notion of self‐making, and the frontier mythology. The following three units move ahead to the twentieth century to investigate how modern migration stories build upon these founding myths to construct notions of ethnicity and American identity. How did modernist migration narratives shape the relationship between ethnicity, region, and nation? In what ways did Depression‐era migration narratives contest the American myths of progress and prosperity? What new ideas about cultural pluralism were advanced by postwar migration narratives?

In addition to attendance, class participation, and in‐class writing assignments, this course requires one short paper (3 pp.), two medium‐length papers (5–6 pp.) and a longer final essay (10–12 pp.), including proposal. (See also the alternative final project idea below).

Required Texts:

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789)

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912)

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)

Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: from the thirties [c.1932] (1974)

Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown [c.1938] (2004)

William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (1941)

Marita Bonner, Frye Street & Environs [c.1930s] (1986)

Carlos Bulosan, America Is In the Heart (1945)

Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy (1971)

Gish Jen, The Love Wife (2004)

*short readings are in course packet

UNIT I: The Roots of American Migration Narratives

Week 1: Puritan Typology and the Exodus Myth

Readings: John Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ (1630)*; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, introduction, chs. 1–2*

Week 2: Self‐Making, Global Economics, and the Transnational American

Readings: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789)

Week 3: The Frontier Myth as American Origin Story

Readings: Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’*; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, ch. 1*

Images: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861); John Gast, American Progress (1872)

Writing Assignment Due: Short Close Reading (3 pp.)

Select one of the primary texts we've read or viewed in weeks 1–3, and offer a close reading (in 3 pages max) that examines how its language/imagery contributes to a mythic understanding of the United States/colonial North America.

UNIT II: Migration and Ethnicity in the Age of Modernism

Week 4: Exodus as Ethno‐genesis

Readings: Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912); Robert E. Park, ‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’ (1928)*

Week 5: Ethnic Modernism

Readings: Jean Toomer, Cane (1923); Werrner Sollors, ‘Ethnic Modernism, 1910–1950’American Literary History 15.1 (Spring 2003): 70–7.*

Week 6: Urban Literature and the Ethnic Childhood

Readings: Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio (1930s); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, ch. 6: ‘ “The Tenement Thinking”: Ghetto Pastorals’*

Writing Assignment Due: Essay 1 (5–6 pp.)

Using any primary reading from weeks 4–6, discuss (in 6 pages max.) how the text meditates between cultures, between the ethnic, racial, or regional subculture and the dominant culture of the nation. How are these cultural realms linked? Are the ‘regional’ and the ‘ethnic’ opposed to modernity, or do they constitute it somehow?

UNIT III: Migration and Reform in the Depression Era

Week 7: The Folk in the Urban Crucible

Readings: William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (1941); Erin Royston Battat, ‘Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Depression Era’Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 539–551, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00428.x.

Week 8: An Okie Ethnicity? ‘Regional’ and ‘Ethnic’ Identity

Reading: Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown (2004) [mss. written 1939]

Week 9: Migrant Mothers: Stillbirths and Aborted Childhoods

Readings: Marita Bonner, Frye Street and Environs (1987) [stories written 1930s]. Read ‘A Possible Triad on Black Notes’, ‘Tin Can’, ‘A Sealed Pod’, ‘The Whipping’, ‘Reap It as You Sow It’, and ‘Light in Dark Places’.

Images: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother and selections from FSA project

Writing Assignment Due: Essay 2 (5–6 pp.)

Using any primary reading from weeks 7–9, discuss how the figure of the migrant operates as a vehicle for social critique in the Depression era.

UNIT IV: Migration Narratives in the Era of Multiculturalism

Week 10: A Nations of Nations: World War II, Anti‐Fascism, and the Rise of Multiculturalism

Readings: Selections from Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1945); selection from a Japanese‐American camp newspaper*; Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity’*

Week 11: The Arrival of a Chicano Voice

Reading: Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy (1971)

Writing Assignment Due: Final Paper Proposal (1–2 pp.)

Week 12: The American Family Redefined

Reading: Gish Jen, The Love Wife (2004)

Week 13: The New African Americans

Readings: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, ‘Extended Lives: The African Immigrant Experience in Philadelphia’. Choose two oral history interviews: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=916; April Gordon, ‘The New Diaspora – African Immigration to the United States’Journal of Third World Studies (Spring 1998).*

Week 14: Wrap‐Up and Writing Workshop for Final Paper

Students will form groups of 3–4, and each student is required to submit a draft to the group at least 72 hours before class. Students will then come to class with written comments on each member's draft.

Focus Questions:

In what ways do migration narratives mediate between ethnic, racial, and regional subcultures and the larger national culture?

In what ways do migration narratives construct group identity, be it racial, ethnic, or regional?

How do migration narratives define and debate what it means to be American?

What are some of the themes, motifs, tropes, or conventions common to American migration narratives?

How have different sub‐cultural groups in the U.S. used the Exodus myth to tell their migration story?

Seminar/Project Idea:

Final Project: Writing a Migration Narrative

Students will create their own migration narratives in order to deepen their historical knowledge of particular migrant and immigrant groups, as well as their understanding of the various forms and cultural functions of these kinds of texts. Students may create a migration narrative in any fictional or non‐fictional genre, such as a modernist experimental piece in the tradition of Jean Toomer's Cane, an autobiography like Mary Antin's The Promised Land or Richard Wright's Black Boy, a photo‐documentary along the lines of Dorothea Lange's American Exodus, a short story such as those in Marita Bonner's Frye Street, or a narrative in another genre of their choosing. All options require thorough research using primary and secondary sources, and careful attention to literary and aesthetic form as well as factual content. Students must draw from at least three primary documents, and are encouraged to conduct interviews if their migration experience occurred in the recent past. (See online resources above for documents and interviews available on the Web. Such sources may include migrant letters, diaries, published first‐hand accounts, images, census data, and oral histories). In addition, students must consult at least four scholarly books or articles that provide a broader context to their particular migration and/or genre. The final product will be an 8–10 page narrative, along with an annotated bibliography describing each source and how it was used. In addition, students must write a one‐page author's introduction explaining the aesthetic form of the piece and why they chose to work in this particular genre. The goal is to create a richly detailed narrative that shows, through both historical content and aesthetic form, how migration transforms personal, ethnic/regional, and national identity.

Requirements:

Page length: 8–10 pages + bibliography and introduction

At least 3 primary sources, including interview(s) if appropriate

At least 4 secondary sources

Annotated bibliography describing (1) the source; (2) how the source was used

One‐page author's introduction that describes the aesthetic form and explains why this particular form/genre was chosen.