Narrative Space and the Figure of the Refugee in the Early Life Writing of Ocean Vuong
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Issued Date
2024-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
0013838X
eISSN
17444217
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85209540915
Journal Title
English Studies
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SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
English Studies (2024)
Suggested Citation
Hart K. Narrative Space and the Figure of the Refugee in the Early Life Writing of Ocean Vuong. English Studies (2024). doi:10.1080/0013838X.2024.2417490 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/123456789/102166
Title
Narrative Space and the Figure of the Refugee in the Early Life Writing of Ocean Vuong
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Author's Affiliation
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Abstract
This paper will read for the representation of space in the Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong’s narrative essay “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation”. The paper places Vuong’s text into conversation with theorists of narrative and architectural spaces–Yi-Fu Tuan, Umberto Eco, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others–and draws on critical refugee studies to explore the representation of spaces and places in their relationship to Vuong’s account of refugee experience and trauma. In the essay’s manipulations of narrative space, meditations on architectural space, and engagements with theories of trauma, a spatial understanding of trauma emerges and comes to bear on first wave literary trauma theory, which the essay builds on and departs from with the suggestion that architectural space functions semiotically and is a medium of language by which topics socially and psychologically repressed can be “spoken” despite social taboos and prohibitions. Working against public discourse which reduces refugees to victims of trauma (in their country of origin) and beneficiaries of social uplift (in their resettlement country), Vuong critiques the discursive framing of the refugee as needful ward and perpetual other and works toward a means of speaking about personal experience that speaks back to dominant narratives about refugees.