Refusal and the American dream in Dinaw Mengestu’s oeuvre

Abstract

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.