Bringing Visibility to Vietnamese American Writers
By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, co-editor of The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers int he Diaspora
After the killing of George Floyd, Black and African American intellectuals spoke against racism in the publishing industry. Yet few considered how Vietnamese American writers encountered similar racial barriers.
Since our student years, Viet Than Nguyen, Lan Duong and I have been deeply concerned about the invisibility of Vietnamese American writers and poets in American society. We have in our adult lives done everything in our power to address this lack of representation through community organizing — Viet and I co-founded the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) for this very reason fifteen years ago. While a few prominent writers such as Viet and Ocean Vuong have now entered the American canon, hundreds of others remain unknown, and many more never have the opportunity to be published.
After Viet won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, DVAN started to garner more attention and support. At our first writing retreat, held at the Djerassi Art Residency in 2019, we invited ten diasporic Vietnamese writers from the U.S., France and Australia to develop their work and engage in a collaborative DVAN project. We wanted to explore if race and geopolitical relations shaped the experiences of diasporic Vietnamese writers and influenced what they choose to write. To do this, we paired two writers together in dialogues and invited them to discuss topics that were important to them. Our aim was to also shine light on the humanity, diversity and complexities of refugees and immigrants of color as a response to anti-refugee sentiments in both the U.S. and Europe.
The dialogues that emerged were profound in both richness and depth. We immediately wanted to hear from more writers. What began as a project of five dialogues turned, five years later, into one of sixteen dialogues. We organized these dialogues into five themes, and provided social and historical context, as well as concepts to frame the discussions. We are very proud of this book. For one, we no longer as critics, need to theorize about this topic, as writers here speak eloquently about complex issues that impact both their work and identity through their own experiences.
The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora is the first anthology devoted to the voices of authors from Vietnam residing in the United States, France, Australia, Canada and Israel. We anticipate that it will be taught in many departments at universities, and be read by both academics and non academics. At a time of the war in Gaza, the severe refugee crisis here and in Europe, and the rise of nationalism in many parts of the globe, the voices of minority writers—whose lives and stories have been shaped by colonialism, wars and racism — are more crucial than ever.
Damaging stereotypes still abound and are being fueled anew, and are continuing to spread violence. Too often, literary works by writers of color are read as if they are completely detached from their own experience. While we do not advocate that they should be read as autobiographical reflections, the fact that they write in relation to the world they live in is, we believe, important to understand. By centering these writers and poets’ voices in the form of dialogues without the power dynamic that can be embedded between interviewers and interviewees, we view this book as effectively challenging false and fix dichotomies, and shift the focus from authenticity and otherness, to the social constructions that influence both the form and the content of diasporic Vietnamese literature. What surfaces from these dialogues are easy-to-read alternative narratives and explanations to the current toxic discourses that seek to dehumanize refugees and immigrants of color, ban their books, and strip their human rights.