Alex Kurmann has just published a chapter Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) in the Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel. Vuong’s novel not only offers a personal literary exploration of what it is to be a gay Vietnamese refugee coming of age in working-class America, but also presents an intimate heterobiography of subjects negotiating queer or diasporic identifications in a changing social class landscape.
The novel specifically explores class at the intersection of refugeeism and sexuality through interrelational connections. These reflect a Foucauldian model of friendship that sees productive new relationships forged in unexpected places amid social discomfort and discordance (1981). Vuong’s depictions of working-class bi-racial, queer and cross-generational relationships speak to Tom Roach’s aligned concept of ‘friendship as shared estrangement’ (2012), which is interpreted here as relationships that socially or culturally alienated subjects uneasily yet unaffectedly forge with their own Others. Narrativizing such intersectional interrelationality keeps alive complex identities that sit outside of prescribed white, middle-class, heterosexual norms, while also memorialising Asian American working-class survival.
Through the literary analysis of interrelationality, the chapter argues that re-examinations of the question of class sociality characterise the millennial novel. In particular, it proposes that Vuong diversifies Intersectional Literary Studies by bringing attention to the disadvantage experienced by multi-ethnic working-class people in the United States.
Details on the collection here.
Asie du Sud Est Research Network 