diaCRITICIZE

diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the significance of "Black April," or what the South Vietnamese in exile call the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.  

Stanley Kubrick satirized the unconscious psychosexual energies behind wielding a gun in Full Metal Jacket, when Marine recruits parade with their weapons doing this chant of "This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun." They seize their crotches at "gun" and "fun." 

How did I get from biracial rage to unexploded ordnance? In my paranoid, angry mind they're both connected by an understanding that we live in a world where there exists an Orientalist imagination that fetishizes Asian women and sees Asia as weak, feminine territory to be conquered by force of arms...

diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on Korea and Viet Nam's tangled relationship since the years of that other Korean War--in Viet Nam.

What does it mean to be Vietnamese? diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen says maybe it's time to ask another question.

As I typed "This is the second editor's note for diaCRITICS, which we've decided to call diaCRITICIZE: The Stuff Vietnamese People Like," I began to have some heart palpitations, within a sense of ambivalence. What if I am not "Vietnamese" enough to be talking about Stuff Vietnamese People Like?