Immigrant Imaginings by Dorothy M. Figueira [Paperback]

In Immigrant Imaginings, comparative literature scholar Dorothy M. Figueira reflects on how her working-class immigrant upbringing shaped her intellectual ambitions, academic career, and relationship with India. She recounts her family’s faith in education, her mother’s determination to challenge restrictive expectations, and the experiences of raising two daughters adopted from India. With irreverent humour and intellectual candour, she also exposes racism, sexual patronage, institutional hypocrisy, and bureaucratic absurdities in American academia, examining what immigration and education make possible—and what they cannot erase.