Between “I” and “We”: Viet Thanh Nguyen's Interethnic Multitudes

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 396-405
Author(s):  
Caroline Rody
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
Social Visions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
A Performance

The rise of an interethnic imagination in recent american literature has been remaking what we think of as ethnic fiction into interethnic fiction. While memory, history, and tradition continue as shaping forces in American letters, an urge toward encounter with others is vividly reworking fictional structures, plots, casts of characters, and uses of language, as well as social visions, literary ambitions, and currents of intertextual influence. In some cases, the mind of a protagonist or narrator, indeed the very mind of a text, comes to seem the site of a momentous encounter of peoples, a living human nexus (Rody). Such is the case in the fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which the interethnic impulse generates a remarkable pronominal drama, a performance that oscillates between a narratorial “I” and a “we” to negotiate—across the pain and struggle of war, dislocation, and immigrant Americanization and across disparate political and literary allegiances—a Vietnamese American voice.

Herman Melville and “Billy Budd”

Tempo ◽  
1951 ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Ronald Mason
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The Public ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Adventure Stories

Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.

Vietnamese American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Janette
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Direct Analysis ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Displaced Populations ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Refugee Experience

While the Vietnam War looms large in American national culture of the 20th century, Vietnam, Vietnamese people, and Vietnamese American experiences have been little attended to. Vietnamese American literature engages this erasure both in writing about Vietnamese perspectives on that war and by expanding the signification of “Vietnam” beyond being a synonym for a war. Beginning in the 1960s, Vietnamese American literature in English was dominated for the next few decades by memoirs, largely designed to educate American readers about Vietnamese politics and history. Rather than continuing to offer Vietnam as it appears in much other American literature, as a surreal backdrop to a US psychic wound, these writers narrate Vietnam, Vietnamese people, and Vietnamese Americans with autonomous geographical, philosophical, emotional, and intellectual presence and perspective, and often provide direct analysis and critique of both the South Vietnamese regime and its American ally. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Vietnamese American literature has diversified in both form and content, expanding the field beyond direct engagement with the Vietnam War and the refugee experience, in work that rewrites canonical Western characters and genres, that challenges normative literary forms as well as social identities, and that explores US racialization, consumerism, and popular culture. In addition to writing Vietnam and Vietnamese American experiences into the national American imaginary landscape, this literature reconfigures the demonized and threatening tropes of the threatening, untrustworthy “gook,” and the passive, dependent “victim” figure, into the socially necessary and beneficial “critical refugee.” Through the experiences of marginalization, trauma, and survival, the critical refugee possesses insights and knowledge necessary for a 21st century of increasing displaced populations, whether from war, famine, or natural disaster. This critical perspective is also more transnational than nationalistic or exilic, exploring both physical and imaginary transnational connections.

scholarly journals Visualising Paul’s Appeal: A Performance Critical Analysis of the Letter to Philemon

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam White
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Performance Criticism ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Performance Setting ◽  
A Performance

Scholars have long noted the passionate rhetoric that Paul employs in his letter to Philemon. In appealing for mercy for the slave, Paul pulls all the stops as he attempts to change the mind of a wronged slave owner and secure Onesimus’ safe return and reconciliation with Philemon. Previous studies have demonstrated the manner in which Paul’s language would pull at the heart strings of Philemon, and through emotional appeal, attempt to move Philemon to a favourable decision. Yet, few if any of these studies have paid close attention to the occasion of the first reading of the letter—what actually took place when this letter was delivered to, not only Philemon, but the Christian community gathered in his house? How was it performed by the lector, whose task it was to animate Paul’s request? What was the atmosphere like in the room where Philemon was now face to face with the slave seeking mercy and the rest of the community looking on at this response? This article will analyse the letter of Philemon through the lens of Performance Criticism. It will seek to recreate its first reading/hearing and highlight the rhetorical elements that can only be fully appreciated when one considers them in a performance setting.

The Vietnam War and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Dynamic Range ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Third World

The first wave of the now-canonical literature of the Vietnam War featured the GI grunt, the wary officer, and the rock-and-roll journalist—all embattled and disillusioned white men. These fictions, memoirs, and reportage came to define the expressive labor shaped by the ethical morass of the war, and these differing genres melded in the cinematic renaissance occasioned by the Vietnam War, which installed a generation of American auteurs. Asian American writers contended with this potent cultural formation, not only to critique the popular imagination of white innocence lost, but to claim the force and even intoxication of this cultural juggernaut. Asian American literary texts from the 1970s onward were shaped by the war and its aftermath—notably including the resistance movements it sparked—and the 21st-century rise of Vietnamese American reckonings with the war’s legacy has instigated significant reappraisals of the aims and effects of the war. The foundational Asian American literary writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin weighed the service of the Asian American soldier in Vietnam in the context of the Third World movements that drove the formation of Asian American studies. A decade later, the publication of bestselling memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, popularly heralded as the emergence of a Vietnamese American voice, marked the origins of a burgeoning field of writing, wide-ranging in form and genre but arrayed alongside and against the mainstream imagination of Vietnam. The major fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) has come to stand as a culminating literary riposte to the canonized first wave of Vietnam War literature: Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel exposes long-standing fictions of U.S. conduct and foregrounds a complex Asian American and refugee perspective. Asian American literature of the Vietnam War expresses a dynamic range of felt responses to the cultural history of the war to produce imaginative work that interrogates the war’s iconic images and reveals its unseen subjects.

Shaking Hands with the Prophet

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Indian ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Native American Literature ◽  
The South ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
A Performance

This chapter focuses on the War of 1812 era and Native American resistance to US imperialism. It documents how the politics of enthusiasm, understood as religious fanaticism, was mobilized to discredit the rise of a multi-tribal Native American confederation and its right to resistance. Tenskwatawa, or the Shawnee Prophet, figures centrally in this cultural criticism, and the author analyzes available accounts of the Prophet and his brother Tecumseh, highlighting indigenous dissent as a performance of enthusiasm. Subsequently, the chapter turns to obscure War of 1812 novels (Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom, Don Pedro Casender’s The Lost Virgin of the South, and James Strange French’s Elkswatawa) in order to show how American literature absorbed Native American enthusiasms. In these novels it becomes apparent that a pro-American vision of the War of 1812 requires the white imagination to displace and appropriate Native America’s rightful struggle for independence. The chapter ends with a reading of the Pequot American Indian, William Apess, and his response to the War of 1812. Apess is unique for defending an indigenous enthusiastic politics in sympathy with the multi-tribal confederation, and he invents a Native American literature of enthusiasm in the process.

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