More Than War: Vietnamese American Literature (in English)

Research talk by Michele Janette, visiting scholar at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (UCPH).

Abstract

The place “Vietnam” and the concept “war” have long been joined in the American psyche, and the officiant of this unholy union has been the camera. In art critic Lucy Lippard's words, the Vietnam War was “the first war we were force-fed through The Tube.” Writing in the context of this reductive and mediated paradigm, Vietnamese American authors have responded with tactical accommodation, earnest didacticism, deliberate redirection, and utter disregard. In the first part of this presentation, I trace an overall history of Vietnamese American literature to show how it has decoupled, complicated, and moved beyond the “Vietnam = war” conflation. In the second part, I dive deeply into how experimental writer Dao Strom reconfigures the camera apparatus through her incorporation of photography in We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People. Through photographic images that she modifies, re-appropriates, glosses, and scores, Strom disrupts consumptive circuits of militarised spectacle, humanitarian illustration, and exotic ornament. Modelling in her book an aggressively critical and also creatively productive engagement with prior texts and the history they would capture, Strom offers readers not only alternative representations and content, but alternative modes of reading and creating.

Bio 

Michele Janette is a professor in the Department of English at Kansas State University; for the spring 2025 semester, she is a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen. Michele specialises in Vietnamese American literature. Her wider interests and teaching areas include Asian American literature, contemporary American literature, cultural studies, film, and feminism. She has edited a collection of Vietnamese American writings (1962-2011) and produced an oral history documentary film about multicultural Kansas history and its preservation.