The Shape of Transplantation as Interface: The Craft of Alienation and Reconciliation in Vietnamerica's Journey Toward Diasporic Identity

• Main Author: Shin, Haerin
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: assemblage; interface; transgenerational phantom; transplantation; Vietnam
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss41/6; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2048/viewcontent/KK_2041_2C_202023_206_20Regular_20section_20__20Shin.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

GB Tran’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010), a coming-of-age story of a second-generation Vietnamese American, crafts out the shape and feel of alienation in its search for a communal identity in the wake of the Vietnam War. Lacking emotional and empirical access to his parents’ liminal position as political exiles, the author combines the power of the literary imaginary with palpable percepts that synesthetically interface the affective dimensions of lost or perhaps yet to be realized beloved objects of cultural affiliation. Reading GB Tran’s medium-specific techniques as strategic enactments of intergenerational reconciliation, I reposition the present-progressive legacies of the Vietnamese diaspora as an affective relationship that calls for an active enactment that extends beyond mere representation.