Alexandra Maria Lossada

“The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention” examines the emergence of the crimmigration subgenre within contemporary post-9/11 multi-ethnic American literatures. A term coined in legal discourse, “crimmigration” refers to how criminal law is wielded against immigrants in inappropriate ways and with pernicious outcomes, such as, for example, increasing rates of incarceration, family separation, and deportation. Within the context of literature, this project proposes that the crimmigration subgenre limns the transnational and literary effects of legally criminalizing immigration through its deployment of ad hoc interpreters. Through the centrality of these interpreters, the subgenre attends to multiple ideas of interpretation within and outside of the texts, such as oral translation, legal interpretation, literary and poetic interpretation, and even intervention by the critic, that contend for primacy in telling the story of crimmigration. The project primarily focuses on six woman-authored archives that invite comparisons between Chicanx, Latinx, Haitian American, and Japanese American histories and literatures. From these manifold views, the subgenre ultimately theorizes and imagines interpretation as a practice that challenges the capacity of nation-states to restrict immigration and enables webs of belonging, care, and resistance to form among interpreters and communities.