Traces of War and Relationalities in Vietnamese Diasporic Literature

Abstract

Critical Refugee Studies offers a mode of reading postwar Vietnamese diasporic literature against the grain of hegemonic American discourse about the so-called Vietnam War. This thematic study of multi-generic and multimodal texts locates the traces of war in Vietnamese diasporic migration narratives, and considers how they gesture to decolonial futurities. Yến Lê Espiritu’s work on Critical Refugee Studies and the related writing of Mimi Thi Nguyen and Viet Thanh Nguyen highlight the material and discursive ongoingness of war, the complex personhoods of refugees, and the political use of refugee policy. Incorporating insights from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, this study argues that Vietnamese diasporic cultural production offers theoretical interventions that reveal and challenge colonial structures embedded in war, migration, and settlement. Chapter one examines the ongoingness of war to depict its relationality to liberal empire, and considers relational approaches to mourning. Chapter two shows that state violence in reeducation and refugee camps represents the material and affective continuation of war. Affect theory and the concept of pornotroping help explain why writings about camp memories emphasize the connections prisoners maintain with others and nature, while writings informed by postmemory register the affective remainder of camp terror in the figure of the victim/perpetrator. Chapter three argues that Vietnamese diasporic writers use boat and airlift tropes, yet refuse arrival, to critically embrace refugee subjectivity through suspension, fluidity, and multiplicity in order to reject the fallacy of certainty in American narratives of rescue and settlement. Chapter four outlines the complexities of finding an ethical sense of belonging in an imperial racial settler state by tracing the way Vietnamese American authors locate problems at home, break out of the settled home, and move toward coresistant love and nonterritorial belonging through mutable moorings to people and place.