Unseen Immigrant fiction context/ wider reading Flashcards
What tropes are displayed in The Thing Around Your Neck by Adichie?
• trope of nostalgic immigrant - ‘They spoke Igbo and are garri for lunch and it was like home’ (narrator feels at home with family doing their cultural practices)
• sense of sacrifice - ‘you gave up a lot but you gained a lot too’
• ‘a mixture of ignorance and arrogance’ from the host community about immigrant’s cultural practices
• discomfort with host community’s cultural practices - hates hot dogs
• disillusionment with host community - ‘In a month, you will have a big car’, hoping for more opportunities
• hard working / ambitious immigrant
What tropes are displayed in Brick Lane by Monica Ali?
• feelings of displacement, looks different (Anderson’s imagined communities) - ‘The women had strange hair’
• communication barriers with host community - ‘She had spoken one word, in English, to a stranger, and she had been understood’
• resilient immigrant - Nazneen hurts her ankle, can’t cross the road at first but keeps going
• adopting host communities cultural practices to assimilate - Nazneen crosses the road with a British woman ‘like a calf with its mother’
• unfamiliar/ overwhelming new setting - ‘kingdoms of rubbish’ ‘ to get to the other side of the street without being hit by a car was like walking out in a monsoon and hoping to dodge the raindrops’
What key immigrant experiences are highlighted in Riz Ahmed’s Airports and Auditions
• on being detained at airports - ‘the situation itself is infantilising’
• three stages to portrayals of ethnic minorities:
stage 1- the two dimensional stereotype (minivan driver, terrorist)
stage 2 - subversive portrayal, challenging stereotypes
stage 3 - the Promised Land - you play a character who is not intrinsically linked to his race
What key immigrant experiences are highlighted in On Going Home by Kieran Yates?
• issues with communication barrier - ‘language is a great battle to fight, and for many it’s a war you always feel like you’re losing’
• hybrid identity - ‘I have a stake in two worlds and this makes me able to love and respect them and absorb the details which simultaneously empower and disempower me’
‘My attempts to align with the traditional Punjab identity fall flat and I’m getting it wrong over and over’
What key immigrant experiences are highlighted in The Wife of a Terrorist by Miss L?
• communication barriers/ ignorance, in drama school asked to do an ‘immigrant accent’
• stereotyping - ‘my terrorist casting is down to my skin colour and my slightly unpronounceable name’
