UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines late twentieth and early twenty-first century poetry, prose, documentary films and photography by Vietnamese and overseas Vietnamese authors and artists born in the 1960s and 70s, near the end of the war in 1975. I argue that brevity, ephemerality, and a preoccupation with the quotidian in these works constitute a radical and sociopolitically significant break from the dominant modes and motivations of war generation narratives in Viet Nam, the United States and France that sensationalize war suffering and problems of postwar recovery, migration and assimilation. Yet far from eschewing the political, as some critics have judged, the young authors and artists in my study insist that "politics need to begin elsewhere, with some experience of the profound otherness of the everyday," to quote Bill Brown on Virginia Woolf. They employ more modest artistic forms and objects of aesthetic attention, milder narrative tones and affects, and gentler ways of seeing and being in the world in order to counter the violence that the previous generation felt compelled to evoke. This deceptive banality represents direct and deliberate social and political engagement similar to the "depth of the superficial" described by Maurice Blanchot in postwar France. It melds the aesthetic and the sociopolitical by instructing us to observe apparently frivolous or ordinary gestures and events that take on salutary meaning in the wake of death; it obscures and comprises the spiritual effects of war and (neo)colonization, urbanization and globalization--grossly, "modernization"--in Viet Nam and abroad. My reading offers a comparative metric against which we might evaluate a politics of form in work that follows after grand historical trauma by individuals who inherit that trauma from previous generations, or who are the bearers of what Marianne Hirsch has termed "postmemory." I wish to contribute importantly to our understanding of postwar aesthetics as well as to studies of literature and culture in Asia Pacific, Asian American, and French and Francophone contexts.