Irreverent yet moving memoirs of a comparative literature scholar whose immigrant inheritance shaped her education, her engagement with India and her experience of American academia.

Dorothy M. Figueira started life in a working-class immigrant household in upstate New York. Her father came from British Guiana; her mother was Italian American. Neither had much formal education. They gave their children faith in learning, coupled with the courage to stand their ground. That inheritance led Figueira to comparative literature, to the Classics, French and German literatures, and Sanskrit. It sustained her through a long career in American academia.

In Immigrant Imaginings, Figueira looks back at the people who formed her and the institutions that tried to define her. There are the Italian grandparents who believed fiercely in the American Dream, and the bookish father who taught her that knowledge was a form of dignity. At the center is her formidable mother, who refused to let a school decide that her daughter should become a hairdresser. The family story later extends to two daughters adopted from India, and to the complicated inheritance they had to make their own.

The book is also an unsparing account of university life. Figueira recalls its casual racism and sexual patronage, as well as intellectual fashions and bureaucratic absurdities. She is hired as a Target of Opportunity, a beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet she refuses to be confined to the subjects her colleagues believe her background fits her to teach. To them, her independence makes her the wrong kind of brilliant.

Written in a learned, irreverent voice, these memoirs follow an outsider who claimed her place without learning to flatter power. They ask a serious question: what do immigration and education make possible, and what can they never erase?