Publishing Date: April 2025
“Every dialogue in this anthology shares ache and joy, emotional and intellectual poignancy, a tender agony: for art, for Việt Nam, for place, space, and scale. The Cleaving is an exhibition of what the purest academic scholarship can achieve: art.”
—Lily Hoàng, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, University of California, San Diego
“Perhaps The Cleaving’s most significant contribution is in contextualizing the work of these artists as part of a remarkably diverse community, as adept practitioners of craft, and as members of a diaspora whose political orientations toward their former and current homelands do not tidily align. This collection compels recognition of the rich aesthetic and creative aspects of such work beyond ‘ethnography to be harvested,’ to borrow from Ocean Vuong’s conversation with Kim Thúy. Simply riveting—I can’t think of anything comparable.”
—Daniel Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War
The first DVAN Writers Residency brought together ten writers and three academics from five different countries to participate in a week-long residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and a public event hosted by the San Jose Museum of Art. DVAN invited these writers to engage in dialogues and recorded them. These conversations were so rich and meaningful that we invited more writers to participate in the project, leading to the production of this upcoming book.
Edited by leading scholars Viet Thanh Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Lan Duong, this book will be a first of its kind to engage a global perspective on the plurality of Vietnamese diasporic experience and imaginaries. By bringing together writers and poets from different countries to speak with each other about issues that are important to them as writers, DVAN is providing a valuable, critical academic tool that will invigorate conversations around Vietnamese diasporic literature and literature in general.
Developed in collaboration with the Critical Refugees Studies Collective, and compiled from curated conversations between over thirty writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who were invited to participate in DVAN public events and residencies, this nonfiction book publication gathers dialogues between Vietnamese writers from the U.S., France, Germany, Canada, Israel, and Indonesia.
