Citation

Cao C. J. Vietnam. Stud. 2008; 3(2): 66-100.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Regents of the University of California, Publisher University of California Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

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Abstract

This article analyzes three short stories of refugee expulsion, immigrant displacement, and exilic return by contemporary writer Trần Vũ. Beyond the binary of nostalgia and assimilation, Vietnamese diasporic identity emerges in these narratives as the tenuous subject of physical and psychic trauma. Informed by postcolonial theories of diasporic identity, Asian American scholarship on racial abjection, and psychoanalytic and feminist analyses of trauma and sexual deviance, I argue that the characters in these stories either succumb to or subvert the unwitting repetition of trauma in their attempts to challenge, if only precariously, patterns of domination through sadomasochism and counternationalist historiography.