The Politics of Space: Vietnam as a Communist Heterotopia in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees
Abstract
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2017) explores hardships and aspirations of non-Communist Vietnamese led between two contradicting geographical imaginations. This article draws upon Foucault’s theories of “other spaces”—heterotopia, utopia and dystopia—to examine the socio-political constructs of space in the manufacturing and diffusion of desired knowledge(s) throughout the collection. It is argued that the particular arrangement of spaces together with the strategic monopolization of knowledge-producing practices throughout the stories produce the effects of regulatory and disciplinary power with the aim of naturalizing certain discursive-ideological policies. The analyses of selected stories unravel the ways in which the Communist Vietnam is ideologically signed as a heterotopia, or a rupture of a decent society. The study also reveals that such negative depictions of the country are in compliance with mainstream epistemic perspectives in the West that aim to maintain a similar discursive regime. Hence, it is concluded that the juxtaposition of two irreconcilable spaces—the heterotopic representation of Vietnam in relation to the utopianised picture of America—feeds into the contemporary discourse of war on terror by reflecting the Cold War register of anxiety about an insidious Communist threat.
Keywords: heterotopic spaces; Michel Foucault; communism; Vietnamese American literature; The Refugees
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Aguilar-San Juan, K. (2009). Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Albrecht, G. (2006). Solastalgia. Alternatives Journal, 32(4/5), 34-36.
Amarinthnukrowh, P. (2019). “So, Obama is a Muslim?”: Toward figurative spaces and blends in US same-sex marriage discourse. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature®,
(4), 1-15. doi: 10.17576/3L-2019-2504-01
Appy, C. G. (2015). American reckoning: The Vietnam war and our national identity. New York: Penguin.
Ashcroft, B. (2009). The ambiguous necessity of utopia: Post-colonial literatures and the persistence of hope. Social Alternatives, 28(3), 8-14.
Ashcroft, B. (2017). Visions of the not-yet: Literature and postcolonial utopia. SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, 52(1), 1-24.
Asl, M. P. (2018). Practices of counter-conduct as a mode of resistance in Middle East women’s life writings. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature®, 24(2), 195-205.
doi:10.17576/3L-2018-2402-15
Asl, M. P. (2018). Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. Asian Ethnicity, 19(3), 383-401.
doi:10.1080/14631369.2018.1429892
Asl, M. P. (2019). Leisure as a space of political practice in Middle East women life writings. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 19(3), 43-56. doi:10.17576/gema-
-1903-03
Asl, M. P., & Abdullah, N. F. L. (2017). Practices of (Neoliberal) Governmentality: Racial and Gendered Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature,
(2), 123-140. doi:10.17576/3L-2017-2302-10
Asl, M. P., Abdullah, N. F. L., & Yaapar, M. S. (2020). Panoptic spaces and the framings of South Asian diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s selected short stories. Cogent Arts &
Humanities, 7(1). doi: 10.1080/23311983.2020.1728022
Billingham, P. (2000). Sensing the city through television: Urban identities in fictional drama. Bristol: Intellect.
Booker, M. K. (1994). The dystopian impulse in modern literature: Fiction as social criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Doudaki, V. (2018). Heterotopias of identity in Sex and the City. Polis(17), 5-22.
Dwyarie, R. D., & Tjahjani, J. (2019). Intercultural concepts in place cliché by Jacques Godbout. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature®, 25(3), 137-149. doi: 10.17576/3L-
-2503-11
Eyerman, R., Madigan, T., & Ring, M. (2017). Cultural trauma, collective memory and the Vietnam War. Politička Misao, 54(1-2), 11-31.
Foucault, M. (1977). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 139-164). Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. diacritics, 16(1), 22-27. doi:10.2307/464648
Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1998). Different spaces (R. Hurley, Trans.). In James D. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (Vol. 2, pp. 175-185). London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (1999). Space, power and knowledge. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (2 ed., pp. 134-141). London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2000). Truth and juridical forms (R. Hurley, Trans.). In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential works of Michel Foucault (Vol. 3, pp. 1-89). London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (D. Macey, Trans. M. Bertani, A. Fontana, & F. Ewald Eds.). New York: Picador.
Grewal, I. (2003). Transnational America: Race, gender and citizenship after 9/11. Social Identities, 9(4), 535-561.
Grewal, I. (2005). Transnational America: Feminisms, diasporas, neoliberalisms. London and Durham: Duke University Press.
Hook, D., & Vrdoljak, M. (2002). Gated communities, heterotopia and a “rights” of privilege: aheterotopology'of the South African security-park. Geoforum, 33(2), 195-219.
doi:10.1016/S0016-7185(01)00039-2
Howarth, D. (2006). Space, subjectivity, and politics. Alternatives, 31(2), 105-134. doi:10.1177/030437540603100201
Janette, M. (July 2018). Vietnamese American Literature. In P. Rabinowitz (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 26 Dec. 2019.
doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.895
Johnson, P. (2006). Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces’. History of the Human Sciences, 19(4), 75-90. doi:10.1177/0952695106069669
Klein, C. (2003). Cold war Orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
Le Espiritu, Y. (2006). The "We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose" Syndrome: US Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the" Fall of Saigon". American Quarterly, 58(2),
-352.
Leib, R. S. (2017). Spaces of the self: Foucault and Goffman on the micro-physics of discipline. Philosophy Today(March 2017), 189-210. doi:10.5840/philtoday2017321153
Levitas, R. (2003). Introduction: The elusive idea of utopia. History of the Human Sciences, 16(1), 1-10. doi:10.1177/0952695103016001002
Nguyen, V. T. (2015). The Sympathizer. New York: Grove Press.
Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nguyen, V. T. (2017). The Refugees. London, UK: Crosair.
Nguyen, Y. T. (2018). (Re) making the South Vietnamese past in America. Journal of Asian American Studies, 21(1), 65-103. doi:10.1353/jaas.2018.0003
Pelaud, I. T. (2011). This is all I choose to tell: History and hybridity in Vietnamese American literature. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press.
Pinak, M. Z. A., & Lalbakhsh, P. (2019). Orientalism on the Margins: Inter-Subjective Space in Edward Granville Browne’s A Year amongst the Persians. 3L: Language,
Linguistics, Literature®, 25(3), 33-45. doi: 10.17576/3L-2019-2503-03
Public Law 107-56. (2001). America Retrieved from https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ56.pdf.
Radzilowski, J. (2009). Introduction: Ethnic anti-Communism in the United States. In I. Zake (Ed.), Anti-communist minorities in the US: Political activism of ethnic refugees.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schlund-Vials, C. J., Võ, L. T., & Wong, K. S. (2015). Keywords for Asian American studies. New York: New York University Press.
Sheth, F. A. (2011). The war on terror and ontopolitics: Concerns with Foucault’s account of race, power sovereignty. Foucault Studies, 12, 51-76. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i12.3337
Silverman, H. J. (1980). From utopia/dystopia to heterotopia: An interpretive topology. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 7(2), 170-182. doi:10.1177/019145378000700203
Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso.
Sylvester, C. (2017). Curating and re-curating the American war in Vietnam. Security Dialogue, 49(3), 151-164. doi:10.1177/0967010617733851
Topinka, R. J. (2010). Foucault, Borges, heterotopia: Producing knowledge in other spaces. Foucault Studies(9), 54-70. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i9.3059
Villet, C. (2018). South Africa as postcolonial heterotopia: The racialized experience of place and space. Foucault Studies(24), 12-33. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i24.5523
Vu, N. A. (2015). From victimization to transnationalism: A study of Vietnamese diaspora intellectuals in North America. (PhD), McMaster University, Ontario. Retrieved from
http://hdl.handle.net/11375/18387
Whittaker, T. (2011). Between the dirty and the pretty: Bodies in utopia in Dirty Pretty Things. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(2), 121-132.
doi:10.1177/1367877910382187
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2020-2601-11
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
eISSN : 2550-2247
ISSN : 0128-5157