Nguyen‘s Ghosts in <i>The Sympathizer</i>: Collapsing Binaries and Signalling Just Memory

Bosman, Sean James

doi:10.1080/18125441.2019.1650818

“…For that reason, the shorts stories focus on the development of personal identity in the absence of political nations that are otherwise significant in determining rights and privileges of an individual (Perlmutter, 2018, p. 87). Bosman (2019) refers to Nguyen's own argument that the dominant discourse about the Vietnam war tends to depict Vietnamese refugees as victims, culprits, or revolutionary heroes whilst never saving them a degree of agency and subjectivity to call for the study of Nguyen's narrators and characters not as the object but the subject of an assertive gaze. Much of the existing body of literature, however, is devoted to the study of Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015) which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016.…”

Section: Refugee Writing and Contestation Of The Objectifying Gazementioning

confidence: 99%

The Objectifying Gaze: A Lacanian Reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees

Hadi

¹

,

Asl

²

2021

gema

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With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unsettling experiences and sufferings of the Vietnamese (refugees) in his debut short story collection The Refugees (2017). This essay seeks to explore the narratives to outline the patterns of looking dynamics and stratified and interracial gaze operating among the characters. To this end, Lacanian theories of the gaze, the jouissance drive and the mirror stage are employed to examine the subtle nuances and complex mechanisms of looking relations that are instrumental in the development of Vietnamese characters. It is easily noticeable that the growing consciousness among the characters of their prescribed inferior position in the scopic order engenders in them feelings of anxiety and/or conflicting sexual impulses, or the jouissance drive. Nonetheless, the hierarchal gaze is not depicted throughout the collection as an essentialized and fixed phenomenon. Rather, some of the Vietnamese characters succeed to control, recodify and reassert the prevailing structural domination of the looking relations, and hence reclaim their agency and subjectivity in relation to the Other. It is concluded that Nguyen successfully upends the dominant discourses of representations in which the Americans' centrality is eternalized while the Vietnamese' is prescribed and nihilated.

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“…For that reason, the shorts stories focus on the development of personal identity in the absence of political nations that are otherwise significant in determining rights and privileges of an individual (Perlmutter, 2018, p. 87). Bosman (2019) refers to Nguyen's own argument that the dominant discourse about the Vietnam war tends to depict Vietnamese refugees as victims, culprits, or revolutionary heroes whilst never saving them a degree of agency and subjectivity to call for the study of Nguyen's narrators and characters not as the object but the subject of an assertive gaze. Much of the existing body of literature, however, is devoted to the study of Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015) which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016.…”

Section: Refugee Writing and Contestation Of The Objectifying Gazementioning

confidence: 99%

The Objectifying Gaze: A Lacanian Reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees

Hadi

¹

,

Asl

²

2021

gema

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unsettling experiences and sufferings of the Vietnamese (refugees) in his debut short story collection The Refugees (2017). This essay seeks to explore the narratives to outline the patterns of looking dynamics and stratified and interracial gaze operating among the characters. To this end, Lacanian theories of the gaze, the jouissance drive and the mirror stage are employed to examine the subtle nuances and complex mechanisms of looking relations that are instrumental in the development of Vietnamese characters. It is easily noticeable that the growing consciousness among the characters of their prescribed inferior position in the scopic order engenders in them feelings of anxiety and/or conflicting sexual impulses, or the jouissance drive. Nonetheless, the hierarchal gaze is not depicted throughout the collection as an essentialized and fixed phenomenon. Rather, some of the Vietnamese characters succeed to control, recodify and reassert the prevailing structural domination of the looking relations, and hence reclaim their agency and subjectivity in relation to the Other. It is concluded that Nguyen successfully upends the dominant discourses of representations in which the Americans' centrality is eternalized while the Vietnamese' is prescribed and nihilated.

show abstract