Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Recently, there’s been a wave of new critical work on Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic film, literature, and refugee/immigrant experience. Here is a preview of Lan P. Duong’s new book, Treacherous Subjects, that reads Vietnamese film and literature through the notion of collaboration and through the lens of transnationalism and feminism.

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Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

book cover

by Lan P. Duong
Asian American History and Culture Series
Temple University Press

paper EAN 978-1-4399-0178-6 | ISBN: 1-43990-178-3
April 22, 2012
E-book EAN: 978-1-43990-179-3 | ISBN: 1-43990-179-1
Not Yet Published

264 pages
6×9
15 halftones

 

From the Publisher
Treacherous Subjects is a provocative and thoughtful examination of Vietnamese films and literature viewed through a feminist lens. Lan Duong investigates the postwar cultural productions of writers and filmmakers, including Tony Bui, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Tran Anh Hung.

Taking her cue from the double meaning of “collaborator,” Lan P. Duong shows how history has shaped the loyalties and shifting alliances of the Vietnamese, many of whom are caught between opposing/constricting forces of nationalism, patriarchy, and communism. Working at home and in France and the United States, the artists profiled in Treacherous Subjects have grappled with the political and historic meanings of collaboration. These themes, which probe into controversial issues of family and betrayal, figure heavily in fictions such as the films The Scent of Green Papaya and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.

As writers and filmmakers collaborate, Duong suggests that they lay the groundwork for both transnational feminist politics and queer critiques of patriarchy.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction  [read an excerpt in .pdf]
1. Manufacturing Feminine Virtue for the Diaspora: The Films of Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung
2. Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Narratives: Traitors and Collaborators in Vietnamese Women’s Diasporic Literature
3. Heroines and Traitors: The Gendered Fictions of Đặng Nhật Minh and Dương Thư Hương
4. Traitors and Translators: Reframing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love
5. Betraying Feminine Virtue: Collaborative Effects and the Transnational Circuits of Vietnamese Popular Culture Conclusion: Family Politics and the Art of Collaboration Notes Works Cited Index

A Review
“Treacherous Subjects offers a new reading of literary and filmic texts by Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporics that rethinks the nation in its gendered, sexualized, and political economic representations. Duong argues that Vietnamese writers and filmmakers from Vietnam, France, and the U.S. evoke the family to imagine the body politic, which is now a transnational one. Duong’s methods are very innovative. In each chapter, she pairs works by artists in different national contexts. Her approach allows for new ways to think through a number of issues with political import. I know of few books that put forth this reading which problematizes the nation and its heteronormative boundaries as effectively as this work does.
—Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, Associate Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA

About the Author
Lan P. Duong is an associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. She was awarded a 2011-2012 Fulbright Fellowship and is working on a second book, which will examine Việt cinema and its relation to Việt Nam and its emergence as a post-colonial nation.

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