Introduction: The "unprecedented" internal U.S. migrations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- The economic and environmental displacements during the great migration: precarious citizenship and Hurston's Their eyes were watching God -- The environmental displacement of the Dust Bowl: from the Yeoman myth to collective respect and Babb's Whose names are unknown -- The wartime displacement of Japanese American incarceration: disorientation and Otsuka's When the emperor was divine -- The economic displacement of Mexican American migrant labor: disembodied criminality to embodied spirituality and Viramontes's Under the feet of Jesus -- Afterword: The mobility poor of Hurricane Katrina: salvaging the family and Ward's Salvage the bones.

Open Access Unrestricted online access star

In Migrating Fictions, Manzella turns to U.S. Women's literature that represents internal migrations in the US in the twentieth century. This project situates itself within the "spatial turn" of literary studies to analyze the way the U.S has displayed a history of spatial colonization, which we see as a pattern we turn to a variety of seemingly disconnected forced migrations. With chapters that focus on migrations related the Dust Bowl, the Great Migration, the migration of peoples placed in Japanese American internment camps, and the migration of Southwestern migrant labor, Manzella makes some fascinating connections across narratives that would not typically be brought together. Ultimately, this project lays bare the oppressive practices of U.S. policy and reveals the resistance individual groups accessed as they completed these internal migrations.

Description based on print version record.