Recent literary expressions of the immigrant experience reveal the postmodern narrative obsession with the immigrant as cultural and political outlier. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern asks us to reimagine this preoccupation with what Junot Diaz calls the “actual flows of third world bodies” as part of a larger, more pertinent motif of the postmodern itinerant. As a figure of cultural becoming, the itinerant stands for displacement and dispersion, exceeding the confines of physical location, political subjectivity, and relation to the natural world. Thus, Wretched Refuge seeks to map the cosmopolitan positionalities of an immigrant or exilic experience: the itinerant, the migrant, and other “foreign” bodies. The essays in Wretched Refuge consider fiction, memoir, and pop-culture genres that reconceive time, space, and the shifting situatedness of the subject within nature, politics, and culture. The book weaves together modern and postmodern visions of itinerancy in the writings of Cormac McCarthy, Bob Dylan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Roberto Bolaño, Paul Bowles, and Bill McKibben, among others. Throughout these radically different narratives, the trace of the itinerant suggests a cosmopolitan response to localized anxieties about global hegemony.

Sixteen years ago, Cassie Johnson was grievously betrayed as she and her family faced death. Since then she has been in exile from society, keeping to herself by the south bank of the Tar River in rural North Carolina. Now, she is luring away the husbands of the three friends who shattered her, who escape their unhappy lives to join her in a survivalist sanctuary.

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse explores the connection between the so-called robber barons who led American big businesses during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the immigrants who composed many of their workforces. As Robert F. Zeidel argues, attribution of industrial-era class conflict to an "alien" presence supplements nativism—a sociocultural negativity toward foreign-born residents—as a reason for Americans' dislike and distrust of immigrants. And in the era of American industrialization, employers both relied on immigrants to meet their growing labor needs and blamed them for the frequently violent workplace contentions of the time. Through a sweeping narrative, Zeidel uncovers the connection of immigrants to radical "isms" that gave rise to widespread notions of alien subversives whose presence threatened America's domestic tranquility and the well-being of its residents. Employers, rather than looking at their own practices for causes of workplace conflict, wontedly attributed strikes and other unrest to aliens who either spread pernicious "foreign" doctrines or fell victim to their siren messages. These characterizations transcended nationality or ethnic group, applying at different times to all foreign-born workers. Zeidel concludes that, ironically, stigmatizing immigrants as subversives contributed to the passage of the Quota Acts, which effectively stemmed the flow of wanted foreign workers. Post-war employers argued for preserving America's traditional open door, but the negativity that they had assigned to foreign workers contributed to its closing.