Abstract
The two essay collections The Good Immigrant (edited by Nikesh Shukla) and The Good Immigrant USA (edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman) present experiences of migration, racialization, and minoritization in British and American contexts, addressing the extent to which the two nations accommodate people of multiple and sometimes complex origins and arguing for the need for acknowledgement of specific experiences, locations, and histories. The analysis of the essays draws on ideas of cosmopolitanism and postmigration, the former of which engages with the idea of conversation without consensus in Appiah’s terms, and the latter which recognizes the need to go beyond divisions into minority and majority society and to see migration as a process that affects societies in their entirety. The essays indicate that compromise in terms of living together despite differences comes at the cost of those who have roots elsewhere, or nowhere, those who are often racialized and minoritized. The essay collections demand the right to be complex, complicated, to resist categorization, and to belong anywhere.
While cosmopolitanism has traditionally been seen as openness to the world, and a cosmopolitan identity as some form of world citizenship, not claiming any specific home but feeling belonging in many locations, postmigration has come to mean the condition in which societies find themselves when migrants and their descendants are no longer seen as minorities, and instead are regarded as natural, legitimate members of communities. Considering contemporary debates on migration in Britain and the United States, for example with regard to Brexit in 2016, the Trump administration in 2017–2021 and the 2024 presidential campaign, and the Windrush scandal in 2018, realities for those with migrant backgrounds may not easily align with theoretical reflections on how individuals and societies transform as people relocate. The two essay collections The Good Immigrant (2016/2017, edited by Nikesh Shukla) and The Good Immigrant USA (2019/2020, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman) provide a variety of perspectives on the act of balancing between familial and societal expectations of people labelled as others, on discrimination and racialization, as well as on the extent to which societies in Britain and the US are actually transforming to accommodate people of different origins. This article examines the ways in which the essay collections balance between cosmopolitan ideals and postmigrant beginnings, focusing on contributors’ representations of lived realities in relation to surrounding societies.
The Good Immigrant consists of 21 essays, most of which are written by professional writers, actors, or artists. Nikesh Shukla (2017: n.p.), author, screenwriter, and editor of the collection, explains in the Editor’s Note that the contributors did not wish to focus solely on race but that “it felt imperative […] that we create this document: a document of what it means to be a person of colour now. Because we’re done justifying our place at the table”. In the second collection, The Good Immigrant USA, the editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman (2020: n.p.) explain that the title of the first, British collection was “a response to the narrative that immigrants are ‘bad’ by default until they prove themselves otherwise. […] We wanted to humanize immigrants, let them tell their own stories and finally be in charge of their own narrative”. The second collection has similar aims, while focusing more explicitly on the immigrant condition in the United States and bringing attention to “a whole world of experience that is too often hidden from view” (Suleyman and Shukla, 2020: n.p.). The importance of race runs throughout this collection, too, contributing to the debate concerning racial justice in the United States and beyond.
Both the UK and the United States are nations of considerable immigration, particularly in the twentieth century and after. Daniel Wilsher (2011: 8–9) observes that the United States is a nation built on and by immigration, yet it was always restricted to some extent from the late nineteenth century onwards. At that time, the concept of more and less desirable migrants was already emerging (Wilsher: 10, 12), and a perception of who constituted a “good immigrant” was taking shape. Immigration controls were introduced in Britain soon afterwards, in the early twentieth century, often for political and economic reasons (Wilsher, 2011: 36). Nadine El-Enany (2020: 1) discusses the image of the “unjustly enriched migrant” and argues that it has been central to British policies for a long time. El-Enany emphasizes the injustices and inequalities present in British society for migrants, particularly those who are racialized, and sees these as “ongoing expressions of empire” (2020: 2). The postcolonial British context is therefore significant, and it is a topic that is addressed in several essays. Onoso Imoagene (2017: 23) observes that a significant difference between Britain and the United States is that people of colour in the former are often migrants or their descendants from previously colonized areas, whereas in the latter, African Americans can trace their ancestry to the slave trade. Restricted migration, too, has played a significant role for racialized Americans, for example early acts designed to limit the number of Chinese or Mexican workers, or later measures against undocumented migrants (see, for example, Schneider, 2011). As observed by Ina C. Seethaler (2021: 2), life writing has a “long history as a tool of resistance for minoritized communities”, inviting critical perspectives on migration and related social phenomena. The essays address the place of people in Britain and the United States who may not have migrated themselves but remain minoritized and racialized.
Examining cosmopolitan ideals and postmigrant beginnings in two separate nations with distinct histories of migration demands attention to the specificities of those histories and to the backgrounds of the writers in question. Cosmopolitanism as a concept and way of seeing the world continues to be debated, with some even seeing it as having lost much of its earlier appeal (Lejeune 2021: 4). Other voices critique its connection to social and economic privilege, considering the fact that so many people struggle to belong anywhere at all (Strand, 2010: 232), and ask whether cosmopolitanism as an idea “is still useful” (Braidotti, Blaagaard, and Hanafin, 2012: 16). Scholarly studies also go beyond seeing cosmopolitanism as simply an idea, emphasizing a “more agonistic and conflictual conception of cosmopolitics” (Nyers 2017: 283) which eschews a simple notion of world citizenship. Such a starting point is relevant for the essay collections, as many of the essays examined present a perspective on the cosmopolitan condition that is both resilient and defiant, indicating that, somewhat paradoxically, cosmopolitan identities require national belonging.
Postmigration, largely European in its origins and developments, takes as one of its more recent focal points the idea that society itself is postmigrant, with all the “conflicts, obsessions and negotiations taking place in societies shaped by migration” (Gaonkar et al., 2021: 20). As Sten Pultz Moslund and Anne Ring Petersen state (2019: 67), postmigration as an analytical tool “refers to a recognition of what has already happened (post-) as well as to a process of ongoing change”. The aim is to go beyond previous meanings of migrants and migration, to question the reasons for othering migrants and to criticize the gap between majority society and its margins (Römhild, 2017). The concept of postmigration also attempts to focus explicitly on trajectories relating to the future, which is a relevant topic in the essay collections as well, as writers examine their pasts and family histories of migration in relation to their own place in Britain and/or the United States now and going forward. Postmigration is suggested as a successor to postcolonialism, carrying on with the work of recognizing the effects of colonialism and migration’s continuous impact on “societal diversity and national histories” (Petersen, Schramm, and Wiegand, 2019: 54).
Cosmopolitanism, or cosmopolitics, is still useful, as theorized by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his acclaimed text Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Appiah (2006: 153) writes that the challenge to cosmopolitanism is “the belief that [other people] don’t matter very much”. Both essay collections explicitly write against such notions of indifference, while observing their continued prevalence. Appiah (2006: 85) argues for the need for conversation, which may not mean “consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another”. A similar viewpoint is presented by Thomas Bender (2017: 117), who notes that cosmopolitanism involves a certain “unease” relating to finding “a new understanding of both one’s self and of the world when invited by the confrontation of difference”. Further, he posits that people have to lose some of their familiarity with themselves and their homes in order to be cosmopolitan (2017: 121). Postmigration, too, is theorized in terms of “togetherness-in-difference”, a position that acknowledges the conflicts that may occur from sharing postmigrant spaces (Petersen, 2024: 191). The essay collections examined speak to a cosmopolitanism without consensus and a postmigrant condition of conflict. The idea of the “good immigrant” is criticized and mocked by several writers, becoming the focus of resistance in the essays, in addition to the often-repeated question as to where they come from, which indicates a perpetual outsider status. The so-called “good immigrant” and the question about origins tie directly to the expectations imposed on those in the margins, on those belonging to racialized groups with or without migrant backgrounds, who are never meant to be fully included, never allowed to fully belong.
Where are you from?
The question “Where are you from?” emerges multiple times in both essay collections examined here. Many of the writers who recount experiences of being asked where they come from equate the question with being othered. Dhooleka S. Raj (2003: 2) outlines that the question “can be a friendly gesture to learn more about and to know a person”, but that it may also amount to a “disruption”. She explains in a footnote that migrants “can claim to be from somewhere. For them, their movement or sojourns create certain places as ‘home’, even a prior one that has changed”, yet for later generations “experiences and assumptions of homeland are challenged on a day-to-day level” (2003: 217–18). The comment is relevant to many of the essays in The Good Immigrant and The Good Immigrant USA as they have been written by people whose parents or ancestors migrated.
“We have learned to belong in the un-belonging”, writes Salena Godden (2017: 195) in relation to her struggles with getting cast for roles. She explains that her mother immigrated to Britain from Jamaica as a young girl (2017: 188) and eventually married Godden’s father who was white (2017: 189). Godden (2017: 193) describes herself as “the curly-haired, brown girl with bright green eyes” who “stood out in the school group photographs” but then states that the situation has changed since her early childhood: “there are millions of us now” (2017: 193). Godden explicitly addresses the question “Where do you come from?” and explains that the reply “‘I just jumped on the tube at Tottenham Court Road’” is not enough: “they’ll tut and shake their heads” (2017: 193–94). Her cosmopolitan dream emerges from a vision of “mixed-race people” as “the hope for change, the peacekeepers, we are the people with an other understanding” (2017: 193). The vision indicates not so much a traditional cosmopolitanism as a postmigrant perspective of “togetherness” (Petersen 2024), with Godden and racialized people like her being the pathfinders. More explicit cosmopolitan views emerge in her essay, too, which she ends on a wistful note: “Let us sail to the colourful island of mixed identity. […] there is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world” (Godden, 2017: 197). Here, Godden expresses a perception of cosmopolitanism that to some extent clashes with her lived reality.
While Godden writes from a British perspective, producer and director Yann Demange, who grew up in London and moved to the US as an adult yet still sees himself as a Londoner (2020: 178, 180), dedicates his entire essay to the “long answer” to the question of origins, concluding that he may be “tribeless” (2020: 195), and explaining why he focuses on “outsiders in storytelling” (2020: 196). Demange (2020: 178) argues that people generally “tend to like things compartmentalized and simple” but asserts that the question of origins has never had a simple answer for him personally. Rather, for him, the question “strikes to the core of something I have found profoundly complicated and difficult to resolve” (2020: 181). Retelling the story of his childhood and youth, Demange mentions changing his name from Mounir to Yann, encouraged by his brother to lessen racist comments (2020: 187). The tribelessness in Demange’s essay speaks to the experience of being a person of multiple backgrounds, and the question arises as to whether “cosmopolitan” is the best way to define such realities. Does cosmopolitanism denote tribelessness, or tribe-free-ness? Is it possible to claim no belonging, to exist as a citizen of the world, as phrased by Godden?
Demange goes on to write that he discovered he had a brother he did not know of, with the same Algerian father, and of their being “undeniably part of the disenfranchised postcolonial North African diaspora tribe” (2020: 189). Claiming belonging to such a tribe locates their life stories within oppressive histories, contemporary struggles to belong, as well as economic and social disadvantage. “Where do you come from?” becomes “profoundly complicated and difficult to resolve”, as Demange argues (2020: 181). He ends his essay by stating that “[p]eople’s lives are complicated, after all. It’s by digging deep into that complexity we find the universality in their experience. There’s no universality without specificity” (2020: 196). The comment is relevant for a discussion of cosmopolitanism, which, as exemplified in many of the essays, needs to emerge from specific experiences. This claim is reinforced by Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, and Patrick Hanafin (2012: 21), who argue that “specificity rather than generality” is significant, as well as “groundedness rather than abstractness, engagement rather than distance, and interaction rather than reflection”, in order to create a cosmopolitics that is firmly entrenched in people’s lives, experiences, and the times and places in which they live and have lived. A need for interaction is also expressed in Appiah’s call for conversation.
Jade Chang (2020: 307), too, states that “[w]e are born in specificity”, recounting in her essay the publication of her first novel in the United States and its reception during the time of the presidential elections in 2016. The novel “refused to engage with the idea of the immigrant or person of color as an outsider” (2020: 303). Chang observes that an outsider status is, paradoxically, coveted in America, and describes a woman at a book signing calling Chang an outsider and her request that the woman reconsiders such a phrase (2020: 306; 309). The incident implies difference between outside categorization and self-imposed labelling. Chang calls for more assertiveness among those categorized as outsiders, to claim their place and their right to an American identity. The essay indicates that equality in people’s minds will not emerge without considerable efforts on the part of those who are othered.
The right to belong in America as stated by Chang is revisited to some extent in Fatimah Asghar’s essay, which also addresses the question of where she comes from: “‘Where are you from?’ usually means ‘How did you get here?’ or the clearer: ‘You don’t belong here’” (2020: 81). Rosario Forlenza (2020: 168) addresses the importance of home for human existence in so far as it provides “self-grounding” (Forlenza: 169). Asghar states that she both does and does not “belong to America” (2020: 87). The statement is made after having examined her belonging, or not belonging, to the place of her mother and ancestors. Asghar notes that she cannot return to Kashmir where her mother came from, which increases her sense of loneliness: “What is my home if there’s no real place my people are from that I can return to?” (2020: 91). The place-related perspective is here emphasized, indicating that tribe itself is not enough but does, eventually, need a place to which to fix itself. That is a central paradox of cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical writing: it is inherently connected to anxieties of place and belonging while also drawing strength from the fact that it cannot fully belong in either place or tribe.
The disruption caused by questions about heritage (Raj, 2003: 2) creates feelings of isolation and divisions that are difficult to overcome as exemplified in many of the essays. The divisions are deeply personal and internal, as outlined by Asghar when talking about the kinship she feels and does not feel with other South Asians: “Half the time I want every single one of you as my kin, and half the time I want nothing to do with you. Perhaps this is the source of my loneliness: belonging and not belonging, always, to you” (2020: 87). The notion of belonging is here connected not to place but to people, or tribe, as described by Demange. Both Demange and Asghar indicate that origins do not necessarily form a natural fundament for belonging, and that adopted homes may not be welcoming enough. “Belonging and not belonging”, as expressed by Asghar, suggest a relationship to place and people that shifts over time, sometimes instantly. In this sense, the cosmopolitan subject as “world citizen” is not necessarily a person traversing borders, being at home everywhere, but someone who might belong in multiple tribes or communities. Belonging also remains fickle, sometimes, at least partly, awarded by surrounding society, yet sometimes taken away, as exemplified in the question “Where are you from?”.
Cosmopolitanism in this context inevitably connects with nationalism and the nation-state, as some form of world citizenship indicates an ability to cross borders freely. The nation-state can be said to have gained new importance through events such as large numbers of asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015 and 2016, and, more recently, the Covid pandemic (Tamir, 2020; Wimmer, 2021) and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. All of the above have had a significant impact on how the nation-state and its sovereignty are defined, controlled, and protected. Yet, John Lysaker (2017: 11) writes that “one doesn’t find much footing if one imagines a political future based on the nation-state”, while Nigel Rapport (2012: 24) explores earlier forms of cosmopolitanism, going back to Immanuel Kant and arguing that Kant’s exploration of cosmopolitanism coincided with the emergence of nationalism and was “intended as a critique and antidote: insisting on the universal over the particular, the human as against the local community, the individual as end not means”. A more contemporary take is offered by Mark Luccarelli (2020: 5), who argues in the edited collection Bringing the Nation Back In: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Struggle to Define a New Politics that the world is currently split into two, with nationalist sentiment emerging on the one hand, and “proclamations of global cosmopolitanism and progress to a world society” on the other, further juxtaposing the two. Recent developments seem to indicate that in times of crisis, nationalism overrides “global cosmopolitanism”. While the essay collections examined do not address nationalism directly, or its relationship to forms of cosmopolitanism, they suggest that origins are still seen as a factor that determines belonging, to some extent more so than where one currently lives — yet there are also examples of rethinking group membership, as in Vera Chok’s essay.
Chok’s essay does not resist labelling and categorization but attempts to embrace them. Writing from a British point of view, Chok reclaims the category “yellow”, while admitting that she knows it may be insulting to some: “When we talk about race, the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ are familiar. ‘Brown’ too has come into play. I use the word ‘yellow’, offensive as many may find it, because this is how I believe I am seen” (2017: 37). Rethinking a racial category previously used in offensive terms indicates that any negotiation of difference (Bender 2017: 117) requires reconsideration among those who are othered about their status and how they are seen, with the potential of eventually transforming how difference is addressed and labelled. Chok ends her essay by stating that people she defines as yellow in the UK are not united through “our wildly disparate cultures nor our real or imagined homelands” but that the “hidden histories, made-up sex lives, violence invisible to others” are central to their sense of collectivity which is composed of what she calls “the plurality of our immigrant narratives” (2017: 44). Thus, “yellow” in Chok’s essay comes to encompass a multitude of identities and belongings.
Race, place, home, and tribe converge in Kieran Yates’s essay, in which she recounts a return to Punjab from Britain after a long period of not visiting the village “where my family comes from, where generations of us have lived, worked and died” (2017: 111). This exemplifies the return that was no longer possible for Asghar, emphasizing the importance of being able to trace one’s heritage and actually go to that physical location. Yates’s return is not simple, however, and she writes that “here, in this village, my specific adoption of Punjab through my own lens is scrutinized by my family and found lacking. They don’t understand my jokes, my observations, my London-twanged Punjab” (2017: 112). Yates indicates that she becomes an outsider in the village of her ancestors, being culturally and linguistically different, and being “anomalous […] in both worlds” (2017: 116). The idea of “hybrid identity and interestingly divided loyalty” as a marker of cosmopolitan identity (Robbins and Horta, 2017: 1) transforms into a “clean-cut duality” and an experience “of being split” (Yates, 2017: 116), taking on somewhat more negative connotations and questioning simple conceptions of fluid identity, or hybrid concepts of home and belonging. A more distinct separation into here and there emerges, embedded in the experience of not being entirely comfortable in any location, any tribe, and the difficulty in reconciling such multiple experiences and identities. Yates recounts being to some extent othered within her extended family, complicating any postmigrant process of living together in difference. However, as observed by Roger Bromley (2017: 37-38), any postmigrant condition is not solely about “‘new belonging’ as it is an agonistic process, a struggle on several fronts — generational and demographic”. The generational struggle becomes visible in Yates’s essay, also taking on a geographic dimension.
The placelessness and tribelessness addressed by Demange, or belonging to many places and tribes while not being fully at home in any, is repeated in many of the essays discussed here. Yates summarizes the split, “the plurality of strangeness”, at the end of her essay, arguing that for her it was always an experience of empowerment, countering “we’ve never had anything to lose, only everything to gain” (2017: 118). The comment indicates that “strangeness” is not solely a negative experience, but that it can be turned into a form of agency. In order for true cosmopolitanism and postmigrant societies to emerge, the feeling of empowerment and having everything to gain would need to go beyond personal experiences and become shared by larger communities. Chok mentions “the plurality of our immigrant narratives” (2017: 44) in her essay, putting emphasis on the individuality of migrants, including those she calls “yellow”, and this serves as an important reminder of the fact that any conversation (Appiah, 2006: 85) should not take place only between those deemed minorities and so-called majority society, but also among the individuals that make up a particular group, with their complex hopes, thoughts, and desires.
Resisting the “good immigrant”
The second section of this article engages with representations and perceptions of the so-called good immigrant, examining essays in the two collections that articulate some form of resistance against the categories and labels with which the writers are often connected. Robbins and Horta (2017: 3) write that cosmopolitanism “can be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others”. The multiple commitments and loyalties have already been established in the previous section, but some writers articulate an experience of exclusion resulting from an externally imposed categorization that is in clear distinction to an internal sense of multiple commitments. Wei Ming Kam (2017: 95) addresses this: “We’re not seen as humans, because we never get to be complex individuals. […] Being a model minority is code for being on perpetual probation”. The concept of model minority is strongly racialized and has often been examined in the context of Asian Americans (see, for example, Wu (2013)), but Wei Ming Kam here writes from a British context, introducing an important viewpoint. The notion of “perpetual probation” indicates not being fully let in and being held to a different standard. Wei Ming Kam ends the essay by stating that “playing to the myth of the ‘good immigrant’ does not lead to real equality, or even acceptance”. Breaking out of the “‘model minority’ box and looking beyond that status towards humanity and freedom is the long game” (2017: 95). “Model minority” indicates cultural expectations that can never be fully met. In relation to this, Shailja Sharma (2016: 25) states that “the privileging of cultural community and a common life” may help explain why people who have lived for decades in the receiving nation are still regarded as outsiders. In Kam’s case, the outsider status can never be fully overcome. Marsha Meskimmon (2011: 8) observes that cosmopolitanism requires “processes of material and conceptual engagement with other people and different places”, and in Kam’s essay it is other people living in Britain who should become more cosmopolitan, not those who have origins elsewhere.
The consequences that arise from categorization and racialization are further explored by Sabrina Mahfouz (2017) whose essay engages with racial categories and their histories in Britain from a fashion perspective, and also with personal experiences of otherness. She criticizes people’s inability to allow for multifaceted ethnic and racial backgrounds due to “our inherited and constructed ideas of what ‘diversity’ looks like” (2017: 146). Anne Ring Petersen and Sabrina Vitting-Seerup (2019: 143) observe that people do not always conform to their “ascribed group identity”, which may complicate their perceptions of self. They note that “discursive ascriptions” may have a considerable impact on people and become part of how they see themselves. Chok’s account of calling herself yellow speaks to this problem, as does Mahfouz’s experiences when wearing a turban in the style of her Egyptian grandmother, or a scarf styled after her Guyanese great-grandmother (2017: 148). The former style of dress relates to her being perceived as Muslim, while the latter elicits accusations of cultural appropriation, as Mahfouz is seen as a white person by two girls of mixed backgrounds who consider her use of the scarf reprehensible. With her cultural heritage, Mahfouz defies categorization, yet she is not allowed to express the diversity of her ancestry.
Cosmopolitics as an “agonistic and conflictual conception”, as argued by Peter Nyers (2017: 283), is useful here. Racialization becomes the overriding experience, taking precedence over personal identification and heritage. Samir Dayal argues for an examination of race in relation to cosmopolitanism, stating that “forms of localism and rootedness can likewise be imbricated with cosmopolitanism; in any case they cannot be simplistically opposed” (Dayal, 2019: 2). A cosmopolitan identity need not be entrenched in any ideal about world citizenship, but has its local roots to take into account. The migration context complicates this, as people whose ancestors migrated but who are themselves not migrants are still racialized and othered according to prejudiced notions of local roots. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s essay “Forming Blackness through a Screen” (2017) recounts some of the author’s experiences of growing up black in Britain, without knowledge of the history of Blackness. The American shows she watched when she was younger did not allow for complexity in black characters, showcasing simple storylines (2017: 80–81). She also acknowledges that “[t]o be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either. It is about consuming versions of blackness, digging around in history until you get confirmation that you were there” (2017: 83). The “localism and rootedness”, as called for by Dayal, may therefore not be related to a specific place but to discovering personal and collective histories, to claiming them as one’s own. As observed by Rob Waters in his book on the history of Blackness in Britain, “[h]istorical time does not stay within discreet epochs” (2019: 221) as it transitions and transforms into present eras, creating new connections and trajectories. Personal identity and perceptions of self may find their bearings in historical periods, the dominant versions of which have often overlooked the participation and presence of less advantaged groups.
As Godfried Asante, Sachi Sekimoto, and Christopher Brown (2016: 368) observe, being black in the United States goes beyond the colour of a person’s skin, comprising “memory, identity, culture, and politics”. Their study includes students of African origin, the position of whom can be one of “relative privilege as ideal immigrants or model minorities” (2016: 370). Some of their informants implied that “African” and “black” came to represent “race” and “ethnicity”, and that they were not always made to feel welcome in African American contexts (2016: 377). These racialized challenges are addressed from an American perspective in Chigozie Obioma’s essay which states that for Nigerians, “America was glorious” (2020: 155), yet “I found myself concerned as days passed that my novelty was wearing out the longer I stayed in America and that, sooner or later, I would be treated like other black men in this country” (2020: 164). Obioma refers to violence against African Americans and an unpleasant incident to which the author himself was subjected, which had little to do with him being an immigrant: “I was simply black” (2020: 165). Racial histories and contemporary realities in the United States have been examined for example by Carol Anderson in her book White Rage in which she outlines injustice in the educational, political, and judicial systems (2017; see Englund, 2022). Obioma’s comment indicates that his Blackness overrides his national background, determining his place in American society.
The idea of race trumping national belonging and origins is revisited in an essay by Teju Cole, who writes that he became African after having left Nigeria and moved to the US (2020: 36). In addition, he also became black, “which proved a more complex journey. ‘African’ was about sharing a mutual space with Africans: friends from across the continent, or people with whom I’d been placed in the same category” (2020: 39). Becoming black, on the other hand, was, for Cole, “more inclusive” but also “more restrictive” in the context of the United States where Blackness is tied to particular historical and cultural processes (2020: 39–40) and the struggle for civil rights. Being black can thus be inclusive and excluding, as indicated by Cole, and may create a space of conflicting and confining perceptions. Cole makes an explicit connection with cosmopolitan conversation in Appiah’s terms when criticizing the universalizing Hollywood version of Africa:
African countries have always been in conversation with the world; an isolationist blackness is incoherent and impossible: we already been cosmopolitan” [sic] […] What we are is shaped by the other, for better or for worse (for us, mostly worse), but interaction is real. The way out is through. (Cole, 2020: 41; emphasis in original)
The same can be said for the process that is cosmopolitanism and any potential postmigrant beginnings: the way out is through, considering all the personal and collective experiences of othering, categorization, belonging, and in-betweenness to which the essays in the two collections attest.
Any constructive conception of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitics needs to acknowledge not only the multiple commitments and connections migrants may have but also their multiple stories. As Craig Calhoun (2017: 191) explains, “[c]osmopolitanism reminds us that we engage the larger world through our specific localities, nations, religions, and cultures, not by escaping them”. There cannot be any general cosmopolitan condition without specific, local contexts, and the essay collections examined here testify to this through their depictions of very personal experiences of displacement, complex belonging, and discrimination. Cosmopolitanism is a fragmented condition that should be seen as a process, connecting with postmigration that can also be seen as a process of moving beyond categorization and perceptions of minority and majority society. Helena Carvalhão Buescu (2015: 22) makes a noteworthy observation in this context, stating that cosmopolitanism could be seen as one of several “possible reactions to the movements of displacement that have affected individuals as well as communities over the course of time”. Such a comment risks diluting cosmopolitanism, but it is relevant because the concept is seen as a “reaction” instead of an idea or category. Cosmopolitanism as a reaction also comes to encompass resistance, refusal to always be secondary and on eternal probation, as expressed by Kam. De Arellano (2020: 294) asserts that “[i]mmigration is retribution”, referring to foreign politics that have disrupted nations and caused mass migration in relation to the recent history of El Salvador. The political dimension to such a statement is significant, and cosmopolitanism itself cannot be examined separately from politics or from local, global, or personal histories. Ultimately, we need to ask how to move forward from racialization and othering, and for this Bromley (2017: 38), referencing the idea of postmigration, suggests looking at narratives that transcend the national and the ethnic “in order to produce stories of complex subjectivities which unsettle, render unstable, ideas of otherness”. The two essay collections examined here give evidence of complex subjectivities and belongings, of racial hierarchies and ascribed identities, yet they also indicate that notions of minority and majority society are often blurred across racial and ethnic lines. What the essays ask for, among so many other things, is the right to be complex, complicated, to defy categorization, and to belong wherever one chooses.
Conclusion: From ideals to beginnings
The two essay collections The Good Immigrant and The Good Immigrant USA can be seen as striving for conversation, for cosmopolitan encounters between the writers and their readers, but not as manifestations of any straightforward cosmopolitan condition or process in terms of world citizenship, as the representations of racialization, othering, and migration offered in the essays are varied. Cosmopolitanism was never meant to provide simple answers to complex problems and examining it in combination with postmigration as a way of moving beyond minority and majority divides may give it the temporal dimension it requires. The essays attest to the fact that communities and entire nations that can be seen as diverse, such as Britain and the United States in the examples provided, do not automatically become cosmopolitan or postmigrant due to the presence of people of multiple backgrounds. It is not enough that one party tries to adapt and belong if the other resorts to labelling, categorization, and discrimination, or imposing expectations on so-called model minorities.
The Good Immigrant and The Good Immigrant USA emerged in the immediate aftermath of an era of increased debate and polarization with regard to race and migration, sometimes addressed in tandem and sometimes separately, yet they also observe more profound historical and political injustices relating to colonialism in British contexts and racial inequality in American ones. The essays emphasize the need for local and specific understanding, and call for complexity, to be allowed to be individuals with intricate lives and identities, which is at the centre of any cosmopolitan ideal and postmigrant beginning. The essays examined express the need for compromise in terms of living together in societies that do not fully accept all their members, getting used to one another, and finding ways forward. Cosmopolitanism’s call for conversation without consensus needs to acknowledge that compromise, more often than not, comes at the cost of those who have roots elsewhere, or nowhere, and who are racialized and minoritized. A true cosmopolitan ideal means not just that the person living in different parts of the world and claiming a home in multiple locations or no locations at all must become open to difference and to the world, but that those who stay put must similarly transform. Postmigration’s emphasis on realities beyond migration, beyond minoritization, encompassing society as a whole, can here contribute with its future trajectories, taking up the metaphorical torch after postcolonialism, and continuing to scrutinize colonialism’s legacies which impact the lives of communities and individuals. Both cosmopolitan ideals and postmigrant beginnings become part of the same process of retribution as asserted by De Arrellano, of interaction as stated by Cole, and of belonging in the unbelonging as worded by Godden.
