Beyond Victims and Voices: On Writing as a Radical Act
Viet Thanh Nguyen, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Alumnus and Pulitzer Prize Winner
Matrix is located on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus, near Telegraph and Bancroft Avenues, just up the hill from Sather Gate. There are entrances at both ends of the building, but only one of the elevators on the eastern side goes directly to the 8th floor. You can alternatively take the stairs to the 7th floor and walk up the stairs.
For minority writers in the United States who wish to be published by the mainstream, the usual options are to embrace being victims to a claim a voice. What if these options are deeply limiting? What if they perpetuate literary and political ghettoization? Offering examples from his novel The Sympathizer and its nonfiction sequel Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen argues for a more radical approach to writing that foregrounds resistance, decolonization, and a recognition of inhumanity.
About Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel made it to over thirty book-of-the-year lists, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Slate.com, and The Washington Post.
His next book is Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which is the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The Sympathizer. Nothing Ever Dies examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the U.S. to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget.”
Along with Janet Hoskins, Viet Thanh Nguyen co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books, including PMLA, American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, the Japanese Journal of American Studies, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. Many of his articles can be downloaded here.
He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.
His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has been a key part of his teaching. In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology. His short fiction has been published in Manoa, Best New American Voices 2007, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross-Cultural Collision and Connection, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, the Chicago Tribune, and Gulf Coast, where his story won the 2007 Fiction Prize. His writing has been translated into Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Spanish, and he has given invited lectures in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Germany.
This event is free and open to the public.