Great Recession, finance and promise in the U.S. immigration novel: The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang and Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Besides the complexity of market structures, the 2008 financial crisis (or Great Recession) has also testified how the representation of the crisis has often been also the crisis of representation: largely focused on the so-called “fiction of the Capital”, and on the white middle and upper-middle class, literature has often been unable to transcend the limits of the traditional “neoliberal” novel and its national(ist) perspective, and investigate the effects of the crisis on ethnic communities, where racial discrimination has long paralleled the economic one. The regenerative potential of the crisis in the XXI century explored by Richard Gray (2011) and the contiguities between derivative finance and language investigated by Appadurai (2016) are the starting point for an exploration of the Great Recession through the immigrant/migrant eyes in two ethnic novels: Jade Chang’s The Wangs vs the World (2016), a comic Coast-to-Coast trip eastward bound involving a wealthy and conflictual Chinese family whose financial ruin leads to the search for their luck back East; and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), the story of a Cameroonian couple and their attempts for a new life in New York chasing the American Dream in the shadow of the Lehman Brothers collapse. In these two novels, the crisis is explored in relation to the concept of the “promise”, at the core of the immigrant experience – both in cultural and linguistic terms; and with the re-negotiations and the new forms of transnational identities imposed by the crisis, that questions the virtual and real value (and price) of the American Dream.

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