Date of Submission

Spring 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Philosophy

Project Advisor 1

Ariana Stokas

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The nature of the immigrant journey is one of my biggest preoccupations. The immigrant emigrates to another country from developing countries armed with a language and a culture that will not be useful in coping with the many difficulties of his new life. In my project, I combine personal narrative from a first-person perspective, poetic, and philosophical writing. It is an investigation on the question of the immigrant and his human condition as a conscious agent who exchanges one mode of being in his home country with another one in the US. In my analysis, I explore the immigrant passage as a way of learning through my phenomenological experience. A passage unique to the immigrant experience. By using my personal narrative as a child of undocumented immigrants and an immigrant myself, I argue the aforementioned points by claiming that once a person goes through a process of mental and physical uprooting, their perception of the world bifurcates. This psychic shift happens when one trespasses corporeal, philosophical, and imaginary borders. And therefore, immigrants essentially gain access to a broader understanding and a more nuanced perception of reality. That perception of the world is similar in comparison with W.E.B Du Bois’s (1994) theory of double consciousness that allows him to see reality from a different light but that also causes philosophical anxiety. I will also be examining the idea of Errantry from Edouard Glissant (1997)—a Caribbean philosophical theory of a rhizome that is Antithetical to one particular Western tradition of thought. A rhizome resembles an individual that does not grow roots and is instead in a state of movement driven by a scared motivation—to argue that immigrants fulfill the conditions to become errants and essentially learn in reading the book.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Download

This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.

Share

COinS