The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States. Claudia Sadowski-Smith

This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study brings to the map of American literature and American studies the post-Soviet migration to the United States and its cultural representations. Claudia Sadowski-Smith examines migration from the former Soviet Union and its successor nations (the ninth largest migration in the United States, according to the 2010 census) with an eye to all its complexities and intricate social, historical, legal, economic, and political dynamics. She examines its representations in television shows, interviews, memoirs, fiction, and documentaries, including the transnational connections such representations bring about, to shed light on the migrants’ status both in their old and new countries. Mapping the uncharted post-Soviet migration and its representations in US culture is, however, just one of the strengths of her study. Sadowski-Smith also offers a clear articulation of the connections between post-Soviet migration, constructions of race, and the effects of neoliberalism. Her book examines the complex migration patterns from the former Soviet Union as “important responses to the extension of neoliberalism” both in the country of origin and the host country (3). In discussing the racialization of new immigrants, The New Immigrant Whiteness expands scholarship on European migration to the United States and problematizes the generally assumed “whiteness” of the new immigrants.