Regarding Vietnam: affects in Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature and film

UnrestrictedThe aftermath of the Vietnam War/American War (post-1975) not only resulted in the largest moment of Vietnamese bodily dispersal around the world, but also figured a crisis in the affective management of the newly minted unified Vietnamese nation, simultaneously forcing exiled refugees to configure new relations to nation and state, notions of the future, and their own selves as bodies in a new world. My dissertation explores how the cultural production of this era -- from artists in the postwar Vietnamese nation and diaspora -- uses the grammar of affect to indict, excoriate, impugn, lament, remember and reconcile the effects of war.; Because of the profoundly specular nature of the Vietnam War, images of loss, grief, and terror continue to circumscribe representations of Vietnam and its postwar subjects in Western cultural representation. Postwar subjects, construed as the “Other,” then, are burdened with the responsibility to provide closure to the unmitigated traumas of the Vietnam War. I argue that the cultural production of Vietnam’s dispersed postwar subjects continues to be looked to, by a global viewing and reading audience, for signs of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness’ so that the history of Vietnamese turmoil can be made coherent and therefore more amenable to market-friendly narratives.; In my dissertation I examine how the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural producers under consideration turn to an economy of affects to torque the narrative on forgiveness and healing as particularly vexing and difficult postwar ethical imperatives. The texts I examine include diasporic renderings of Vietnam’s epic poem, The Tale of Kieu, by the diasporic variety show Paris by Night and by the scholar and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh Ha, the contemporary literature of Vietnamese Australian writer Nam Le and Vietnamese American writer le thi diem thuy whose stories detail the difficult reckoning of children to their fathers’ failures, two films by two prominent postwar directors -- Tran Anh Hung and Dang Nhat Minh – in which vision and nostalgia act as concomitant and paradoxical processes at work in remembering and honoring Vietnam, and finally the popular-fiction of the Vietnamese-language writer Nguyen Ngoc Ngan, a popular personality of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through an analysis of select works in his corpus, I examine how Nguyen Ngoc Ngan identifies sadness and sorrow as burdens of Vietnamese postwar masculinity. His depictions call upon the sympathies and empathies of available “affective communities” in the diaspora but they do so in complex ways that acknowledge other feelings and emotions that emerge for his readers as they consider Vietnamese postwar men and manhood.; My dissertation follows the traces of affect in postwar transnational and diasporic Vietnamese cultural representation and shows that an attention to affects does more than give a glimpse into internal subjectivity; such an attention can offer Critical Studies complex and varied language to assess how deeply it is that cultural texts are underwritten by appeals for connection and understanding