Refusal and the American dream in Dinaw Mengestu’s oeuvre

Abstract

Across Dinaw Mengestu’s three novels, which can be read as a loosely interconnected trilogy of Ethiopian immigrants’ experiences of the United States, he repeatedly disrupts the conventional frame of the migrant narrative through his protagonists, who refuse to pursue the American dream and the freedoms it proposes. Instead, they choose to adopt a largely indifferent attitude toward the seductions of neoliberal subjectivities and the aspirational templates of what a successful life looks like. This paper is interested in how Mengestu stages these refusals across his three novels—The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names—and the forms of alternative freedoms these refusals afford his protagonists. Further, the paper tracks the price these protagonists pay for these refusals, in the shape of a repeated sense of paralysis and lethargy, that simultaneously allows them rich metafictional insights into the cracks of neoliberal capital’s promises and its impossibilities.

Keywords:

• Dinaw Mengestu
• American dream
• refusal
• freedom
• neoliberal capital
• freedom

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) research project at the University of the Witwatersrand, for support towards this research. All views are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their feedback and suggestions. Special thanks to the reviewer who drew my attention to Aziz Rana’s work.

2 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental network founded in 1961, initially featuring thirty-eight member countries which shared an interest in developing economic policies for sustainable growth. See https://www.oecd.org/ for more detail.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grace A Musila

Grace A Musila teaches at the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015); editor of Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture (2022) and Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (2020); and co-editor of Rethinking Eastern African Intellectual Landscapes (2012, with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga).