College Honors Program

“Neither Here nor There”: Formal Alterity in Vietnamese American Narratives from 1997-Present

Date of Creation

5-17-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Only

Department

English

First Advisor

Jorge Santos

Abstract

This thesis offers a new angle on literary productions of the Vietnam war, positing that generic ambiguity and hybridization occupies a central role in three diasporic productions: Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish (2020), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Central to this discourse is generic alterity, and how each writer employs hybridizations of genre or medium to suit the subject matter. Profound experimentations with Gothic fiction and detective fiction in Monkey Bridge, graphic novel and fairy tale in Magic Fish, and poetry and epistolary novel in Briefly Gorgeous, address the difficulty of representing the Vietnamese American identity through Western categories of form. Rather than abiding by conventions proffered by the American literary canon, these three novels and authors reenact a literal and literary crossing of borders, which remain essential for navigating the U.S. while maintaining semblances of a Vietnamese national identity. This thesis operates from a postcolonial linguistic framework, employing cross-cultural interventions into Asian American studies, subaltern studies, race theory, and queer theory.

Comments

Reader: Oliver de la Paz

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