Of Kiel and Catela: The materialist turn in contemporary migration literature

ABSTRACT This study seeks to understand migration literature as a global phenomenon shaped by social, historical and economic factors. Adopting a comparative approach, the paper considers Feridun Zaimoglu's Abschaum alongside Tim Z. Hernandez' Breathing in Dust as works representative of contemporary German-Turkish and Mexican-American migrant literature. Such writers are widely understood in terms of post-structuralist theories such as hybridity. Relying on Aijaz Ahmad's intellectual history of the 20th century and Lucien Goldmann's notion of genetic structuralism, this work seeks to more fully understand the realization of socio-historical factors in migration literature. Both works focus on disenfranchised migrant communities whose labor has become redundant in post-industrial capitalist societies. In foregrounding the socio-economic factors which shape migrants lives each writer renders a critique of dominant discourses surrounding immigration and the status of immigrants in each nation. Abschaum critiques the German criminal justice system and liberal human rights discourse of the German state as a whole, making explicit fundamental contradictions which underlie the Gastarbeiter program. Breathing in Dust not only narrates the history of discrimination and oppression of Chicano/a labor migrants as a means of subverting normative American notions of equality and freedom, but also critically engages the cultural nationalist ideology of Chicanismo by making explicit the trend which unites these works – their assertion of the status of migrants being a product of socio-economic and historical factors over the primarily cultural view of migration advocated by post-structuralist theories.