Immigration Essays - Softcover

Baker, Sybil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936196573 ISBN 13: 9781936196579

Publisher: C&R Press, 2017

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. When Baker received a MakeWork grant to write about Chattanooga's unheard voices, she had no idea that her project would take her from the homes of Chattanooga's refugees in "Landings" to what "Critical Flame" calls a "Sebaldian travelogue through the Syrian migration route" in "Reverse Migration." From her childhood home near Ferguson, Missouri, to her travels as an expatriate living in Asia, to the troubled cities of Eastern Europe, Baker explores the physical and emotional wanderings of what Mary McCarthy calls "exiles, expatriates, and internal emigres."

"Adventures of a Fake Immigrant" and "Schemers" examines her ambivalent complicity in Chattanooga's rapid gentrification and the erasure of its historically black neighborhoods.

Using photos, literature, and her own family's slave-owning history, Baker excavates her own past as well as Chattanooga's to try and understand the ghosts that haunt her and the city she inhabits. With a poignancy that is particularly relevant for these times, the voices in this collection echo through the text and shine brightly through the dark.

About this title

From the Author:

When I was first awarded a MakeWork Grant in January 2014 to write about Chattanooga's unheard voices, I had planned to interview a few people and write down their stories, which were to be published as small chapbooks. The project quickly became overwhelming--I soon found that there are so many people in Chattanooga whose stories deserve to be told and listened to.
Where was I to begin?
Someone suggested I contact Marina Peshterianu, the Associate at Bridge Refugee Services. As soon as I emailed her, I realized that I had met her several times socially. We met for coffee, and Marina then put me in touch with refugees who agreed to tell me their stories. I interviewed each of them twice, and as I collected my notes, I struggled with the best way to do justice to their stories by telling them in compelling ways. While I worked on those essays, I also was given contact information for an undocumented young woman from Mexico. After I met her twice, I started writing her story. By now I was well into my one-year sabbatical at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and the essays had become a bigger and more ambitious project. I began to also write about my own experiences as an expatriate and traveler, incorporating literature and other research into some of the essays.

During this time, Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a few miles from where I was born. I read about my own family's slave-owning past and Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay on redlining and reparations published in the Atlantic. More information was also being published about the "two cities" that made up Chattanooga--one largely white and middle class, the other impoverished, also white but mostly Black. While Chattanooga kept patting itself on the back for its revitalization, it was clear that a large part of the city was not reaping the rewards
of this change. I began to think about my own complicity and connections to race, neighborhoods, and gentrification, and how I might begin my own reparations to redress some of the wrongs I have committed.

In February 2015, I continued my sabbatical as a Visiting Professor at Middle East Technical University in North Cyprus. That experience teaching a predominantly Muslim population
and my later travels through Turkey and Southeastern Europe allowed me a chance to experience a region right before the migration crisis exploded on the international scene.
When I returned to Chattanooga in the fall of 2015, I wrote new essays about my travels and dramatically revised the essays I'd written. As I wrote those, I began to think about how being
married to an immigrant has also informed my worldview in other matters. I knew the essays were still somewhat dry, and my beta readers kept telling me they wanted more of my personal life in the work. I somewhat reluctantly began to put in more of my own experiences in the essays to add more depth to the work.

I also was re-reading and teaching Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose, and I was thinking of ways in which photos and footnotes might destabilize and defamiliarize the primary texts. "Reverse Migration," which was published by The Critical Flame, is in form my most experimental. Daniel Pritchard, the editor, pointed out the essay was "Sebaldian" (referring to W.G. Sebald, who combined photos and text into genre-bending classics). Intrigued by
the comparison, I decided to integrate personal photos into the other essays to continue the "Sebaldian" aesthetic.

As a result, the essays in this collection represent many forms--some are personal essays, and others incorporate research and references to other literature. While they vary in form and style, all of them revisit and return to my own obsessions and questions in this collection: race, immigration, refugees, expatriation, gentrification, family, and the myth of the American Dream.

From the Back Cover:

When Sybil Baker received a MakeWork grant to write about Chattanooga's unheard voices, she had no idea that her project would take her from the homes of Chattanooga's refugees in "Landings" to what Critical Flame calls a "Sebaldian travelogue through the Syrian migration route" in "Reverse Migration." "Adventures of a Fake Immigrant"  and "Schemers"  examine her ambivalent complicity in Chattanooga's rapid gentrification and the erasure of its historically Black neighborhoods. From her childhood home near Ferguson, Missouri, to her travels as an expatriate living in Asia, to the troubled cities of Eastern Europe, Baker explores the physical and emotional wanderings of what Mary McCarthy calls "exiles, expatriates, and internal emigres."
 
Using photos, literature, and her own family's slave-owning history, Baker excavates her past as well as Chattanooga's to try and understand the ghosts that haunt her and the city she inhabits. With a poignancy particularly relevant for these times, the voices in this collection echo through the text and shine brightly through the dark.From the Inside Flap

About this edition

• Publisher: C&R Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1936196573
• ISBN 13: 9781936196579
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 138