Popular Culture and Immigration

We started our book, Immigration and American Popular Culture, ¹ with a scene from the Will Smith film vehicle Men in Black II—for more than a few reasons. The scene (as we will discuss in a moment) from this 2002 movie had quite a bit to say about immigration, identity, memory, Americanness and otherness. It processed these large concerns with a light touch and a sure sense of purpose. But although we were certainly interested in parsing the content of one particular scene in the movie, more important for us was to begin our study of how popular culture and immigration have been mutually constitutive with a distancing move. For too long we scholars of immigration have contented ourselves with comforting paradigms and overly familiar images: key words and phrases such as ‘assimilation’ (or even Milton Gordon’s more nuanced “Anglo-conformity” in Assimilation in American Life ² ) and ‘acculturation’, and images—say Alfred Stieglitz’s “The Steerage”—that have cornered the academic and popular market. The usual problems of saturation and narrowcasting apply here—the ‘winning’ words and pictures tell at best a partial, and at worst a misleading, story about immigration and American cultural history. (Stieglitz’s picture, of course, is of poor people leaving the US—’birds of passage’ they were, although it seems our collective unconscious processes the photograph in a much different way.) We wanted to start with Men in Black II, then, because it hadn’t already earned a stop on the Immigration Hit Parade, and was not even obviously about immigration.