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Vietnamese American Literature and Refugee Aesthetics a Dissertation Postcolonial Appetites: Vietnamese American Literature and Refugee Aesthetics A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Timothy K. August IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Keya Ganguly, Adviser May 2014 © Timothy K. August, 2014 i Acknowledgements During the writing of this dissertation I have learned that any project of this size must be a collaborative effort. Expressing the proper amount of gratitude for those who have helped me along the way is an impossible yet rewarding task. Growing up I understood very little about the academic environment, I did not know what producing a PhD meant nor what it entailed. Working in this institution, then, was constantly an education and I learned from, defined myself with, and at times against, who and what I saw around me. While I would like to thank everyone that I met along the way I am particularly grateful for the ongoing support and council of a select group of fellow graduate students: Namrata Gaikwad, Na-Rae Kim, Catherine Nguyen, Garnet Kindervater, Sara Saljoughi, and Liz Zanoni. It has been a privilege to build this cohort of colleagues from both inside and outside my home department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, which reflects how much my journey has benefited from working in interdisciplinary environments. The faculty, staff, and students in the Asian American Studies program have been generous intellectual interlocuters during the entirety of my time here, a development that has shaped both my present and my future. As well, working for, and with, the University of Minnesota’s Writing Center refined my writing, revising, and editing skills, but just as importantly taught me ways to generate a generous, welcoming, and healthy academic environment. Their help and influence should be evident in the many chapters of this dissertation that were brought together during several meetings I had with Katie Levin. ii There have been numerous members of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature who have lent support, but I want to single out Robin Brown, Kate Gallagher, Richard Leppert, Gary Thomas, and Nicole Tollefson for their guidance and service. My research has been generously supported by numerous travel grants from CSCL and the Asian American Studies program, and also the CLA Graduate Research Partnership Program, FLAS grants, and the Edward Said Memorial Fellowship. A highlight of my time here was working as an assistant editor and book review editor at Cultural Critique. This was an invaluable experience where I learned from senior editors Cesare Casarino, Keya Ganguly, John Mowitt, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, and Simona Sawhney, while enjoying the collegiality of my fellow assistant editors Tom Cannavino and Alicia Gibson. I want to thank the members of my committee, without whom this project simply would not stand in the form that it is today. Keya Ganguly, Timothy Brennan, Donna Gabaccia, Josephine Lee, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Shaden Tageldin, have each taught me in their own way how to be a scholar and a member of the academic community. For this I am sincerely grateful. Finally, on the domestic front I would like to acknowledge my son Andrade for making this process Better and more meaningful. I thank my dear wife Thien, who has Been with me every step of the way, through the trials of immigration, frantic last minute revisions, first publications, my dead-eyed stares following rejections, and Being there to celeBrate when something came through. And I would like to thank my parents as without them this would not Be possiBle, for I would not iii be possible. But also for their continued and unabated love, support, and trust, as I continue to figure out how I can Be meaningful in the world. iv Abstract This dissertation examines the crossing of global literary tastes and Vietnamese American culinary writing. Specifically, I argue that Vietnamese American writing illustrates how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression across the colonial, anti-imperial, and neoliberal eras. As it is still a nascent genre, Vietnamese American writing has not yet Been consolidated formally or critically, and therefore a new generation of writers and actors are actively experimenting with forms that will fuse the experience of refuge with the challenges faced in a racially charged United States. Through a close examination of various literary and cultural texts, I ask how, and, perhaps more importantly, why cuisine has Become a popular organizing trope for these diasporic authors to work through the harsh legacies of the colonial project, the US intervention in Vietnam, and refugee life. Using a transnational and comparative approach, I demonstrate how Vietnamese American artists engage their own history of European and American domination By turning to gastronomic literature. I contend this literary movement seeks to reanimate the sensual loss experienced during wartime and the period of refuge in order to articulate a uniquely somatic Brand of “Vietnameseness” that can travel across the globe. This literature responds to the commodification of western multiculturalism and the gloBal desire for manageable ethnic difference by providing intimate cultural touchstones that make social positions intelligiBle v without Being completely translataBle—resetting the terms of transnational cultural contact. vi Table of Contents Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food 1 Chapter 1. The Contradictions in Culinary CollaBoration: Producing Vietnam On Demand 23 Chapter 2. Diasporic Still Life: Asian North American Storytelling and the Cultural Politics of Stasis 50 Chapter 3. Gastrodiplomacy: Culinary Nationalism, Empire, and the Event of Eating 101 Chapter 4. Postcolonial Promises: The GloBal Politics of Vietnamese American Fiction 144 vii Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Refugee Aesthetics 175 Bibliography 191 1 Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk about Food This dissertation is a literary-historical project that investigates the politics of global gastronomic tastes and the countervailing force of Vietnamese American culinary writing. Many academic accounts of food culture track how particular cultures come to recognize a group of culinary objects as their own cuisine. I approach the study of food through another direction, demonstrating how the rhetorical linking of identity and cuisine has developed as a geopolitically significant act. By historically situating how eating, cooking, and preparing food is represented in a number of literary works, I illustrate that the merging of culture into cuisine is a modern ideological invention rather than a found essence. My object of study is Asian American literature and media, where I argue that contemporary Vietnamese American writing, in particular, demonstrates how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression. Using a comparative and transnational approach, I show how Vietnamese American artists turn to gastronomic literature to engage their own history of European and American domination. This public body of work, then, seeks to define their cultural position, both internally and to the US population at large. The material force of these artistic interventions, I suggest, has been refashioned into a new literary movement that seeks to reanimate sensual loss and articulate a uniquely somatic brand of “Vietnameseness” that can travel across the globe. 2 Entering the United States as refugees, the first major wave of Vietnamese immigrants had very little language training and institutional access, which resulted in very few books written in English by Vietnamese American authors. However, in the past decade a generation acclimatized, and often born, in the US have come of age, equipped with the English language skills and cultural capital to tell stories of Vietnamese immigration in a way that their predecessors could not. With the 1.5 generation finally making the requisite cultural and capital gains to shake off the enduring image of tired huddled Vietnamese refugees, this new wave of artists is searching for forms that pay homage to their forbearers, but are not solely defined by them. The simultaneous burden and opportunity these authors face, then, is to construct narratives that deal seriously with the material and psychic effects of the traumatic passage without reducing all of Vietnamese American experience to this one event. A key strategy that Vietnamese American authors and artists use to narrate their place in the nation is to leverage a general interest in their food and cuisine to convey the complexity of Vietnamese diasporic identity and politics. As it is still nascent, Vietnamese American writing has not been consolidated formally or critically, and therefore a new generation of writers and actors are actively experimenting with forms that will properly fuse the experience of refuge with the challenges of growing up in a racially charged United States. Through a close examination of various literary and cultural texts, I ask how and why cuisine has become a popular organizing trope for these diasporic authors to work through the harsh legacy of the French colonial project, US intervention in Vietnam, and refugee life. I query what is to be gained by using this 3 seemingly tame and accessible device, rather than engaging in a more direct or confrontational “writing back” to exploitative power. To examine the aestheticization
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