Catherine Nguyen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (2021-2022) for her project, Children Born of War, Adoptees Made by War: Vietnamese Diasporic Contestations of Empire and Race.  

Catherine’s project investigates the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee as the figures through which France and the United States negotiate citizenship and refugee displacement and moreover, rewrite military loss within their history of colonial and military occupation of Vietnam. The project challenges the prevailing idea that the mixed-race child is constructed as an object of rescue and employs the conceptual framework of hospitality to reveal the impossibility of the mixed-race child’s full incorporation by way of repatriation and adoption. Reading Vietnamese diasporic works in French and English, the project explores how the mixed-race child as subject complicates the distinctions between refugee and adoptee. Attending to the failures of hospitality and acts of hostility, the project draws attention to how the mixed-race child undermines the expected gratitude and thus offers critiques against the welcome into the family and nation that serves to reconcile military violence and recuperate imperial loss. 

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This article examines the problematization of, and the proposed solutions to, cultural métissage in the first published Vietnamese Francophone novel, Le roman de mademoiselle Lys (1921). It investigates how the author, Nguyen Phan Long, founder of the Constitutionalist Party of Cochinchina, uses French syntax as a rhetorical means of disciplining Vietnamese women in French Indochina. I interpret his use of French literary traditions of novelistic and fictionalized diary-writing to impose Confucian ideals on Vietnamese women, and read his mirroring of French “diary-novels” as a reflection of his desire to respond to journaux-romans and their French male authors. 

Read the article: Angelica Pisey So, “Nguyen Phan Long’s Le roman de mademoiselle Lys: ‘L’éducation de nos filles’ in Colonial French Indochina”.

Image: Rebecca Klein, DatASIA Press

France-Vietnam: Bibliothèque des flamboyants is a bilingual digital library (French-Vietnamese) exploring the cultural, historical, colonial, and scientific interactions between France and Vietnam from the 17^th century to 1954. A collaboration between the French and Vietnamese National Libraries, the project is part of the “Patrimoines Partagés” collection, which bears witness to the historical and ongoing relations between France and the world. 

Led by Nguyen, head of the Southeast Asian Languages and Literatures collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the France-Vietnam digital library makes thousands of rare documents available in their entirety. Bridging French and Vietnamese memories, the site gathers a varied corpus of leaflets, manuscripts, maps, drawings and photographs from French and Vietnamese collections. Accompanying texts by French and Vietnamese specialists, researchers, and curators illuminate and contextualize these materials.  

The documents, which include translations of classic works, new literary production, and scholarly manuals, are divided into eight thematic rubrics: circulations, traditions, thought and spiritualities, literature, cultural transmission, governments and dynasties, the sciences and society, and economic life. These rubrics are further divided into 36 subheadings. 

Notably, the collection contains nearly 10,000 documents from the Dépôt legal indochinois, created between 1922 and 1954, which are available online for the first time. This wide-ranging collection is an exceptional resource for the history of Indochina. 

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Image: L’Ecole d’art de Giadinh, 1935; National Library of Vietnam 

Focused on the experience and legacies of the Khmer Rouge marriage policy, this essay examines Cambodia’s culture of silence surrounding gender-based violence in the era of #MeToo and highlights a set of cultural responses that confront silence, countering it with a multifaceted mode of expression that aims to unite survivors across communities, generations, and experiences. Spanning a range of media, including documentary cinema, the plastic arts, and classical Khmer dance, the “language” emerging in these responses is at once restrained and excessive, naming the experience of assault in the public sphere without creating an imperative to speak publicly. More importantly, it offers a multimedial, polyvocal means through which survivors of gender-based violence see their traumas recognized and shared by the broader collective. These initiatives offer a culturally situated, restorative approach to addressing gender-based violence, past and present, that stands in productive contrast with the largely retributive #MeToo movement. 

Read the article: Leslie Barnes, “Reckoning with Forced Marriage in the Era of #MeToo: Silence and Gender-based Violence in the Cambodian Arts”.

Image: San Nan, Woman and Memories; Photograph, Van Channarong/Bophana Center 

Organized by ASERN members Elizabeth Collins and Howie Tam, and including papers by Leslie Barnes and Catherine Nguyen, this panel spanned cultures and continents, exploring connections, perspectives, and solidarities among francophone Asian writers, filmmakers, artists, and activists in the Francosphere today. What might it mean to be “Asian” in the francophone world, and how are these questions considered in literature, cinema, bandes-dessinées, digital media, and other aesthetic forms? How have events such as the defence of universalist republicanism  in the aftermath of the death of Samuel Paty and the rise of anti-Asian racism and violence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic sharpened this focus? 

Asian in the Francosphere? Views on Transcultural Literature, Film, and Media:

• Xinyi Tan (Coastal Carolina University): “Thinking beyond the French-Francophone dichotomy: the literary identities of François Cheng, Ying Chen, Shan Sa, and Kim Thúy” 
• Howie Tam (Harvard University): “Diasporic Return and Search for Worldly Home in Anna Moï’s L’année du cochon de feu“
• Xiaofan Amy Li (University College London): ”East Asia and Francophone Writing”  
• Elizabeth Collins (University of Pennsylvania): ”‘#AsiatiquesDeFrance’: Confronting Anti-Asian Racism in Contemporary France through Digital Media”
• Leslie Barnes (Australian National University) ”Smoke and Mirrors: Sex Work and Rithy Panh’s Cinematic Image” 
• Catherine Nguyen (Harvard University): ”Drawing Little Wars in Marcelino Truong’s Graphic Memoirs” 
• Haiqi Zhou (University of California, Los Angeles): ”Frédéric Chau: (Dis)Appearance of the Chinese Community in French Cinema” 

As Vietnam was caught in wartime narrative austerity from the 1950s to the 1970s, followed by the communist state’s intolerance of dissent, Vietnamese writers in the French and American diaspora have offered literary texts that challenge both Vietnamese discursive stricture and dominant perspectives in France and the United States. This essay studies two novel sequences from the diasporic Vietnamese literary archive: Vietnamese French author Ly Thu Ho’s trilogy and Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao’s pair of historical novels. Taking a historicist approach, the essay reveals complex nationalist expressions, aspirations, challenges, and desires in Ly Thu Ho’s and Lan Cao’s works of fiction. 

Read the article: Howie Tam, “Diasporic South Vietnam: Literary Nationalisms in Novels by Ly Thu Ho and Lan Cao”.

Image: Les Editions de la Frémillerie 

Karl Britto has recently joined the editorial boards of two new publishing initiatives involving The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). DVAN is collaborating with Kaya Press to publish diasporic literary works, especially in translation; the first will be an English translation of Line Papin’s Les os des filles, which is slated to appear this year in the Ink & Blood series. DVAN is also collaborating with Texas Tech University Press on a series that will specifically publish Vietnamese and Southeast Asian American novels, memoirs, poetry, anthologies, and graphic novels. 

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Image: Kaya Press/Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network 

This article explores how Franco-Cambodian cartoonist Tian’s graphic novel, L’année du lièvre [Year of the Rabbit], represents second-generation postmemory in the form of, what I call, a “Cambodian family album,” or a personal-collective archive. The album serves to convey to subsequent generations: 1) the history of the Cambodian genocide, 2) the collective memories of pre-1975 Cambodia preceding the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, and 3) the Cambodian humanitarian crisis and exodus of the 1970s-1990s. The conceptualization of the family album is derived from the literal translation, from Khmer into English, of the term “photo album” – “book designated for sticking pictures.” The translation of the term emphasizes the fragmentary and creative nature of postmemory, or the second-generation’s experience of their parents’ trauma. This article begins with an analysis of L’année du lièvre as family album and moves beyond the comics medium to show how Cambodian identity is being reshaped and renegotiated through 1.5- and second-generation Cambodian genocide survivors’ contributions to film, dance, and the literary-arts.  

Read the article: Angelica Pisey So, “Cambodian Family Albums: Tian’s L’année du lièvre” 

Image: Tian/Editions Gallimard