Migration Novels as Archival Spaces: Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive and Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson argues that novels have historically played a key role in shaping the nation-state through collective imagination. Similarly, in The Origins of the English Novel (1987) Michal McKeon underscores how novels impact a nation’s social, cultural, and political evolution. Intensified globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century has weakened the sovereignty of the nation-state, resulting in its deterritorialization and leading scholars to reconsider the novel’s ties to national literature. In her landmark Through Other Continents (2006), Wai Chi Dimock demonstrates the novel’s enduring ability to transcend borders and time, emphasizing its transnational and transcultural roots. She positions the novel within a growing planetary discourse that opposes globalization and aims to reimagine the world beyond established historical processes and narratives. The novels Lost Children Archive (2019) and Immigrant, Montana (2018), by Valeria Luiselli and Amitava Kumar respectively, emerged in this cultural context. Both authors, migrants to the US, employ the genre in a novel way. By drawing on and challenging the authority (“commandment”) of the archive and the origin (“commencement”) embodied within it, they disrupt historical narratives that have led to inequalities and exclusions and design their novels as alternative archives from which marginal narratives can emerge (Derrida, Archive 1).