Beyond the refugee experience: Redefining exile, metissage, and the aesthetics of representation in Vietnamese diasporic literature from France and North America

This dissertation defines the emergence of Vietnamese diasporic literature through a detailed analysis of the complex, transnational literary contacts that obtain between France, Canada, the United States, and Vie&dotbelow;t Nam. Within this context, I am particularly interested in showing the evolution of Vietnamese overseas literature from refugee to diasporic literature. As Vietnamese overseas authors stop merely retelling the war, they show a clearer desire to claim the United States, Canada and France as their adoptive home even while they refuse to be either assimilated or marginalized. As a result, there is particular meaning to be found in the ways Vietnamese overseas writers choose to represent themselves and what relationship they entertain with the act of writing. While a profound sense of homelessness predominates in the Vietnamese overseas community, this very homelessness is counteracted by writers in that community for whom the function of writing issues in the creation of literary space as an alternative "home."; The first chapter presents the genesis of Franco-Vietnamese literature as it originated in colonial Vie&dotbelow;t Nam, before accounting for the relocation of its writers to North America and France. The five remaining chapters present readings of fourteen contemporary diasporic Vietnamese works to identify and define a canon of Vietnamese overseas literature written in European languages. These readings are organized by location (France, Canada, the United States) and by theme: biracial/bicultural identity; the situation of flight and exile; the experience of returning to the homeland.; Whether it be one of celebration or contention, the space of writing created by Vietnamese overseas writers enables a courageous exploration of racial, cultural and literary metissage that is an intermixing that serves to express intercultural identity and to negotiate a more self-affirming position vis-a-vis both homeland and host culture. It is thus by examining how these writers choose to represent their hybrid identity at the intersection of writing, memory and art, that their experience of migration is best understood.