Swati Rana

Image of Swati Rana.

Swati Rana

Type
Dissertation Fellow
Department
English
2010-11

The research of Swati Rana (English) presents a comparative literary historical study of early twentieth-century immigrant writers in the United States. Titled “Who You Calling Immigrant: Alienage and Nativity in the Literature of Brown America, 1900-1965,” Ms. Rana’s dissertation focuses on a time when the ethnoracial landscape had not yet been defined by the civil rights movement or by changes in immigration flows initiated by 1965 immigration legislation. Ms. Rana unites a number of canonical as well as rarely-studied writers under the conceptual rubric of brownness in that they are not exclusively black or white, citizen or alien, nativist or foreigner. These writers employ a set of literary figures—myths of origin, fictive attributions of kinship, tropes of pregnancy and rebirth, and fantasies of miscegenation—to create what Ms. Rana terms immigrant nativity, the imaginative production of belonging by immigrants.