Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration
Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration

Author: Joseph R. Urgo

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780252064814

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"In a land where there is constant migration, can there be a "homeland"? In the United States, migration is initially experienced as immigration, but the process never achieves closure. Migration continues as transience - restless, unsettled movement across social and economic classes, states, and national borders. In this nuanced study grounded in literature, history, and popular culture, Joseph Urgo demonstrates that American culture and our sense of national identity are permeated by unrelenting, incessant, and psychic mobility across spatial, historical, and imaginative planes of existence." "There is no better example of a writer reflecting on this migratory consciousness than Willa Cather. At home in numerous locations - Nebraska, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Canada - Cather infused her novels with the cultural vitality that is a consequence of transience. By locating transience at the center of his conception of our national culture, Urgo redefines the mythos of American national identity and global empire. He concludes with an analysis of a potential "New World Order" in which migration replaces homeland as the foundation of world power."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Opting for Elsewhere
Opting for Elsewhere

Author: Brian A. Hoey

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2014-12-31

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0826502946

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"Do you get told what the good life is, or do you figure it out for yourself?" This is the central question of Opting for Elsewhere, as the reader encounters stories of people who chose relocation as a way of redefining themselves and reordering work, family, and personal priorities. This is a book about the impulse to start over. Whether downshifting from stressful careers or being downsized from jobs lost in a surge of economic restructuring, lifestyle migrants seek refuge in places that seem to resonate with an idealized, potential self. Choosing the "option of elsewhere" and moving as a means of remaking self through sheer force of will are basic facets of American character, forged in its history as a developing nation of immigrants with a seemingly ever-expanding frontier. Building off years of interviews and research in the Midwest, including areas of Michigan, Brian Hoey provides an evocative illustration of the ways these sweeping changes impact people and the communities where they live and work as well as how both react--devising strategies for either coping with or challenging the status quo. This portrait of starting over in the heartland of America compels the reader to ask where we are going next as an emerging postindustrial society.

Lifestyle Migration
Lifestyle Migration

Author: Michaela Benson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1317105168

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Relatively affluent individuals from various corners of the globe are increasingly choosing to migrate, spurred on by the promise of a better and more fulfilling way of life within their destination. Despite its increasing scale, migration academics have yet to consolidate and establish lifestyle migration as a subfield of theoretical enquiry, until now. This volume offers a dynamic and holistic analysis of contemporary lifestyle migrations, exploring the expectations and aspirations which inform and drive migration alongside the realities of life within the destination. It also recognizes the structural conditions (and constraints) which frame lifestyle migration, laying the groundwork for further intellectual enquiry. Through rich empirical case studies this volume addresses this important and increasingly common form of migration in a manner that will interest scholars of mobility, migration, lifestyle and culture across the social sciences.

Causes and Consequences of Human Migration
Causes and Consequences of Human Migration

Author: Michael H. Crawford

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-11-08

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 1107012864

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Up-to-date and comprehensive, this book is an integration of the biological, cultural and historical dimensions of population movement.

Country of Exiles
Country of Exiles

Author: William R. Leach

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-08-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0307760510

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In Country of Exiles, William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility. He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity. Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders. With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche.

Migration as Avant-garde
Migration as Avant-garde

Author:

Publisher: Kettler Verlag

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783862067183

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Today, more people than ever are fleeing persecution and war. Over 68 million people are on the move worldwide, according to the UN's latest figures. With his new book "Migration as Avant-Garde," Michael Danner delivers a moving, critical, and thought-provoking contribution to the current public debate. He skillfully deploys a variety of elements and combines his own photos and texts with historic images. The result is a consistent but multifaceted narrative, which is frequently deconstructed both in terms of design and content. While the title at first seems somewhat bewildering, it becomes self-explanatory in the course of reading the quotations, interspersed throughout the book, from Hannah Arendt's 1943 essay "We Refugees." The events that Arendt wrote about more than seventy years--giving up one's home, one's friends, family, and language--are more pressing today than ever before. In search of progress, driven by the desire for a better future, and risking their lives, people both then and now hit the road, break through physical and psychological boundaries, and thus provide our society with new perspectives and ways of thinking.

The Economic Consequences of Immigration
The Economic Consequences of Immigration

Author: Julian Lincoln Simon

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780472086160

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Argues convincingly that immigration continues to benefit U.S. natives as well as most developed countries

Great River of the West
Great River of the West

Author: Professor of History William L Lang

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2013-10-10

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780295802763

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In the Pacific Northwest, the river of dominance is the Columbia, and in ways both profound and mundane its history is the history of the region. In Great River of the West historians and anthropologists consider a range of topics about the river, from Indian rock art, Chinook Jargon, and ethnobotany on the Columbia to literary and family history, the creation of an engineered river, and the inherent mythic power of place. Since first contact between Euro-Americans and Native peoples during the late 18th century, the river's history has been characterized by dramatic demographic, social, and economic changes. The remarkable set of essays in Great River of the West investigate these changes by highlighting important episodes in the history of the river. Readers meet mariners who challenge the Columbia River bar, a family torn by insanity, Native people who preserve fishing traditions, and dam-builders who radically change the Columbia.