National descent: Vietnamese diasporic literature and film

In the Vietnamese idiom, "nori chon nhau caˇ´t ro´n," the homeland is figuratively the "place where one buries the placenta and cuts the umbilical." Focusing on the dynamics of dispersion, separation and roots, National Descent: Vietnamese Diasporic Literature and Film concentrates on representations of the homeland by the Vietnamese diaspora during the pre-revolutionary 1940's, post-1975 refugee migrations, and contemporary Renovation period or "Doi Moi" politics of modern Vietnam. This project diverges from two trends in diaspora studies that locate subject formation "in-between" an East/West binary or a cosmopolitan versus native opposition that privileges "routes" over "roots." I argue that the tenuous sense of home in exilic displacement is not solely the experience of diasporic subjects but is also evident in depictions of native characters and in various national literatures themselves.; Borrowing Michel Foucault's concept of archaeology and genealogy, this project analyzes diasporic narratives fixated on disrupted or false lineage as indexes to the persistent discontinuities of origins. Vietnamese identity appears in these texts as gothic-like anomalies such as a "blood brother," a pregnant man, infant corpses, paraplegic mothers, and a sado-masochistic primal scene of indigeneity and internal colonization. These uncanny characters function as "genealogical doubles," fragments that continually multiply and re-articulate the composition of Vietnamese identities. Negotiating the processes of rejection and recuperation between homeland and diaspora, these figures attest to the multiple and often competing epistemologies that foreground (or forestall) the emergence of diasporic identites.; Though return to origins narratives are inevitably marked by a measure of failure and irrecuperability, Vietnam in these texts is more than a "no-place"---a lost homeland, a nostalgic landscape existing only in memory, or a dystopic, post-war wasteland. It is also an accessible, heterogeneous, and dynamic site of constructing and contesting Vietnamese identities at home and abroad. Centered on works produced in France by Pha&dotbelow;m Vaˇn Ky, Tra`n Vu, Linda Le, and Tra`n Anh Hung, this project extends its comparative analyses with Vietnamese writers in the United States (Trinh T. Minh-ha), Germany (Pha&dotbelow;m Thi&dotbelow; Hoai), and Vietnam (Nguye˜n Huy Thie&dotbelow;p).