GB Tran’s Vietnamerica as a Reworking of Discursive Temporalities

Abstract

Since the 1960s, American writers in different genres of literature have tried to understand the Vietnam War and its effects. They have composed poems, short stories, play scripts, as well as fiction as a form of literary imagination that touches the reality of the contentious War in U.S. history. Among others, this paper investigates the representation of times in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family Story (2010) from the intersection between graphic novels and life writings. The patriotic discourse on military intervention has been dominant whereas memories of torture, the massacre, and international refugees have been considered negligible in U.S. public history. Tran, using texts and images together, reclaims heterogeneous times, times of the calamity and survival that formally silenced Vietnamese subjects who have lived across the Pacific Ocean. In this article, I examine the ways in which Tran employs literary tropes in graphic memoirs, such as the combination of texts and images, sequential panels, and autobiographical I’s, in order to revive the authentic voices of silenced Vietnamese subjects.