Displaced Subjects and Refugee Literature, 1965-1996

Abstract

This chapter reads and surveys Vietnamese American literature as a creative refugee endeavor that was carefully tailored to meet the material needs and pressures of refugee life during the period 1965-1996. This era was a challenging period during which, despite close to 100 English-language volumes written by Vietnamese/Vietnamese American authors, finding a readership interested in the stories that refugees wanted to tell required multiple strategies of textual emergence. These challenges produced a bifurcation of public and private narratives and created a split between simple pedagogical stories that responded to the pragmatic demand to explain oneself and more complex stories that attended to the needs of the burgeoning community and the migrant psyche. With the Vietnam War looming large over their creations and the ways that these literary works are read, this era of Vietnamese American literature could be characterized as a series of attempts to rewrite and remap racial and cultural expectations of refugees, while laying the groundwork for greater forms of self and communal expression.