On US immigrant farm fiction published from 1900-1950

This lecture examines the forgotten corpus of multilingual US immigrant farm fiction published from 1900-1950. It traces the cultural work of these novels in responding to rural reformers’ xenophobic conceptions of immigrants as unfit for farming. 

In these years, popular agricultural treatises warned of the perceived threat to US-born farmers posed by global immigration. Reformers claimed that these new arrivals hailed from “agriculturally-doubtful” races. In response, as I show, modern writers from diverse linguistic and ethnic communities employed antipastoral tropes and narratives to depict immigrant populations at the forefront of a dramatically changing rural scene, with agribusiness and intensified resource exploitation reshaping the countryside. 

The talk links high modernist writers like Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Willa Cather--who responded to these debates--and overlooked immigrant writers, including Vilhelm Moberg, Ole Rølvaag, and Israel Schwartz. The antipastoral strain of immigrant rural modern literature that I chart in the lecture offers an engaging commentary on the economic changes that were reshaping rural places and global populations in the 1900-1950 decades around a highly mobile population of farm workers and investors.