Migrant aesthetics : contemporary fiction global migration and the limits of empathy Traditionally the American immigrant novel has been characterized by the plot of assimilation and stories about becoming (or failing to become) American. However the focus on individual stories of transcendence (the migrants that make it ) often obfuscates larger forces that lead to migration and determine the conditions once migrants arrive. The genre of immigrant literature also depends on a model of reading empathetically that can easily slip into projection and condescension. As Glenda Carpio argues the semi autobiographical tales of Americanization tend to reinforce difference and keep non immigrant readers in the sentimental terrain where feeling badly for sufferers is a privilege a commodity that gets packaged and sold. In Migrant Aesthetics Glenda Carpio focuses on how a set of contemporary novelists including Teju Cole Dinaw Mengetsu Aleksandar Hemon Valeria Luiselli Julie Otsuka Junot Díaz Edwidge Danticat and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio frame migration crises on a broad as opposed to a personal scale and the formal strategies they employ to examine larger forces shaping migration. Through their particular styles these writers highlight historical resonances across genres as well as across time and space to reveal the broad scale of migration and its relationship to the slave trade colonialism and neo colonialism. These writers works foreclose standard empathetic readings by rejecting autobiography in favor of strategic anonymity choral or collective narration unlikable narrators and shifting vantage points. Ultimately these writers challenge the view that migration is the problem of the migrant who must beg admission to sites of power