The Style of “an Immigrant’s Manifesto”: Analysing Suketu Mehta’s This Land is Our Land

Abstract

Written in “sorrow and anger”: this is Salman Rushdie’s comment on Suketu Mehta’s This Land is Our Land. An Immigrant’s Manifesto, published in 2019. In the first chapter, “A Planet on the Move”, Mehta adds “rage and hope” to better express the feelings that led him to the writing of an immigrant’s manifesto, a nonfictional work written in struggle, with a language “carried to the barricades”, as the literary genre usually requires (Jasinski 2001).

Bringing together autobiography, interviews, historical accounts on colonialism and neocolonialism, economic data and surveys, as well as cultural reflections and literary references, the Indian writer and academic based in New York seems to employ the same rhetorical and discursive strategies that belong to the anti-immigrant narrative (e.g. the us-them dichotomy, war metaphors, use of opposites), in order to deconstruct the current populist narrative on immigration and build a counter-discourse.

Drawing from theories on language, power and rhetoric (Leith 2019, Fairclough 1989), on racism and discourse (Van Dijk 1998) and on postcolonial studies (Gandhi 2007) my paper investigates the stylistic features of Mehta’s narrative, highlighting the elements that characterize a manifesto, as well as the tools of postcolonial stylistics in a work that spans across lands and languages, whose tone is not merely polemical, nor simply critical. I elaborate on the way Mehta “struggles” to be convincing about issues of migration and racism, writing a contemporary postcolonial manifesto.