“You Don’t Have To Be Born There": Immigration and Contemporary Fiction of the U.S. South

Traditionally, the U.S. South and its literature have been defined in terms of a supposedly fixed, rooted, and distinctive “sense of place.” This chapter considers how such traditional definitions have been radically recast in recent decades by the trends of globalization and immigration, and how writers—many of them from immigrant backgrounds, or from outside the South themselves—have remapped the region. The chapter focuses on three immigrant trajectories to the U.S. South—from Asia, Africa, and Latin America—as represented in the fiction of (among others) Susan Choi, Ha Jin, Robert Olen Butler, Lan Cao, Dave Eggers, and Cynthia Shearer.