| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this thesis is to argue for the importance of remembrance, of intersectional analysis, and the central role of fiction in the writing of history. These arguments will be made with special regard to queer, diasporic, Asian American writing, focusing on On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong. This thesis argues that Vuong’s novel should be read as a significant relic, that will aid in reimagining American, as well as global, history as more than a master narrative, and arguably, transcending what language can articulate. This thesis will explore how the novel serves as a disruptive and recollective discursive force, as well as how the collapse of language and structure can become a tool for conveying meanings that are otherwise impossible to articulate. We need to examine how the novel navigates borders of identities created and upheld using language, and how it becomes a vehicle of retrospectively navigating landscapes of identity, trauma, and memory. This thesis will argue for how Asian-American writing appears to challenge and disrupt conventions of historical and novelistic representation to unearth neglected histories and, ultimately, resist erasure. An intersectional analysis, this thesis argues, is useful in terms of uncovering more than how dominant groups perform domination through a particular medium. An intersectional analysis can also uncover the ways in which subaltern groups “build, maintain, grow, or use their power in relation to such systems of domination as masculinity, femininity, whiteness, maleness, Western might, discrimination, prejudice, and/or stereotypes” (Esposito 47), among other systems. Through this mode of analysis, which unpacks hegemony as it is produced through dialectical processes, we may begin to build an increased awareness of the pedagogies of text and develop ideas that gesture towards greater social justice. Intersectional analysis, then, does not primarily concern itself with disadvantage, but rather how hegemony is challenged and disrupted. This thesis brings together scholarship that encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to queer, diasporic literature, collecting scholarship that informs an intersectional reading of such literature. This scholarship draws from refugee studies, war studies, intersectional theory, critical race theory, and gender studies in an approach to Asian American writing that seeks to unify disciplines concerning the intersectional bodies of the text. | eng |