'There Will Be Fire': (Re)imagining Vietnamese American Citizenship through Literature

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Informed by the current trend in Asian American studies to question Asian Americans’ and Asian Americanist scholars’ attachments to ‘America,’ this thesis considers how Vietnamese American literature currently contributes to the negotiation and imagination of Vietnamese American citizenship, and the possibilities for this literature to contribute to utopian political projects that imagine a world beyond the U.S. nation-state. In the Introduction, the thesis examines dominant narratives about the Vietnam war to understand Vietnamese American positionality, then analyzes Vietnamese American literature, theorizing that dominant narrative forms (most notably, the ocean-crossing chronotope) have emerged within V.A. literature and problematizing their dominance. The bulk of the thesis is a collection of three original short stories, which are foregrounded with sociopolitical context. The stories explore model minority subject formation and patriarchy, the climate crisis and displacement (and the generic possibility of speculative fiction for Vietnamese American literature), and intergenerational trauma and relationships.

Type of resource	text
Publication date	June 13, 2023; May 22, 2023

Subject	American literature > Asian American authors
Subject	American literature > Asian American authors > History and criticism
Subject	American literature > Vietnamese American authors
Subject	Vietnamese Americans in literature
Subject	American fiction > Asian American authors > History and criticism
Subject	asian american studies
Subject	vietnamese american studies
Subject	critical refugee studies
Subject	Refugees
Subject	Vietnamese Americans
Subject	southeast asian american studies
Subject	vietnamese american literature
Subject	Short stories
Subject	Short stories, American
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/hh247rc3116
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/hh247rc3116

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA).

Preferred citation: Nguyen Tilley, I. (2023). 'There Will Be Fire': (Re)imagining Vietnamese American Citizenship through Literature. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/hh247rc3116. https://doi.org/10.25740/hh247rc3116.

Stanford University, Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Honors Theses

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