Treacherous subjects: Gender, culture, and trans-Vietnamese feminism

摘要

In Treacherous subjects, Lan Duong does what most Asian Americanists studiously avoid, that is, she engages in sharp criticism of nationalism in so-called 'homeland' and community politics. Her ambitious new book provides a courageous and much-needed gender analysis of Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American and French-Vietnamese literature and film, hopefully paving the way for new scholarship that looks across national borders. This approach should prove particularly fruitful in analysing Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions. Not only does it disrupt the borders placed by the institutionalisation of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies and the ideological divide between Vietnam and refugee communities abroad, it also reveals the impact of the legacy of colonisation and American imperialism on women and the stories they produce. Such complex comparative examination creates new ways of conceptualising Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic identities.