the good immigrant edited by nikesh shukla

People feel emboldened, in America and the U.K., because of who runs our countries, how the press cover them, their dog-whistles and the fires they're stoking. We are seeing, every day, instances of casual and violent racism and everything in between. NS: I'm answering this question the day after Jussie Smollett was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime and a Bollywood actor used a racist word to describe a Black soccer player. You shouldn't have to jump through hoops to have a right to be home. To think about how complex, and even contradictory, the immigrant experience is. We have to pull out the superpowers first, or work as a doctor, or chef-always serving and providing-to be good. The media, the government, our neighbors start out being suspicious of us until we win an Olympic sport or a reality TV show or scale a wall to save a small child dangling from a balcony. What does the title, The Good Immigrant, mean?Ĭhimene Suleyman: The default for immigrants ends up with us having to prove our worth.

I didn't anticipate all this would happen in tandem with Brexit and the increasingly toxic national conversation around immigration, so we inadvertently caught a mood. We crowdfunded the book with Unbound, so I could prove to the publishing industry that people did want to read books by British writers of color, and we were at 104 percent before a word of the book was even written.

I figured that doing an anthology could satisfy both those itches and also be a platform for writers who the British readership deserved to hear from more. At the same time, having read Claudia Rankine's exceptional Citizen, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, I wanted to read a contemporary book about race and immigration in the U.K. and felt like I wanted to do something more positive than just whine on Twitter all the time. Nikesh Shukla: I was increasingly irritated by the lack of British writers of color being published in the U.K. version (published in 2016), and Chimene Suleyman, poet and columnist, about putting the book together, the need for new immigrant narratives, and the politics of being an artist.

We speak to co-editors, Nikesh Shukla, who also edited the U.K. In a new book The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, a wide-ranging group of writers, from comedians to journalists to poets, explore what being an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, in the U.S. What makes a good immigrant? If the media is anything to go by, a good immigrant is someone who works hard, integrates into society, behaves themselves, becomes an athlete or a film star or saves a life-someone who must prove their worth to their new country.

The good immigrant edited by nikesh shukla