Affects of Exile: Vietnamese Diasporic Authors Linda Le, Monique T. D. Truong, Tran Anh Hung, and Linh Dinh

This dissertation reexamines the role and meaning of ethnicity in postcolonial literary studies. To do so, I compare the specific instances of subject formation in literary and filmic texts by four authors of Vietnamese descent: Linda Le's Voix, Monique T. D. Truong's The Book of Salt, Tran Anh Hung's The Vertical Ray of the Sun, and Linh Dinh's "After zigzagging." Individually, various affects and figurations of exile reflect a diasporic subjectivity produced by the dynamics of integrating into a new language, culture, and nation. Collectively, their differences call for a new reading practice that interrogates their ethnicity, which is currently construed as a common cultural background or condition of struggle. The close reading of each text through the lens of psychoanalysis illuminates the process and manner in which the author poignantly struggles with loss and assimilation.;I introduce psychoanalytic concepts, such as paranoia, repetition, fetishism, and the fantasmatic, into the discussions of diasporic aesthetic, as each functions as a sign or figure bringing out the particular form of social relations and conditions in a specific situation. By investigating multiple authors of shared Vietnamese ancestry and upbringing, I show that they became, rather than simply being born into, an ethnic identity and category. In his or her own fashion, each reveals his or her social bearings on the world, responding to representations that do not necessarily correspond to his or her lived experience of exile. My dissertation pertains to the burning and complex issues of affects, exile, and symbolization, identification and community, as well as the futures of kinship in a diasporic and postmodern world.