Kathy L. Nguyẽ̂n

Lan P. Duong

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

Mariam B. Lam

Pairing image and text, Troubling Borders showcases creative writing and visual artworks by sixty-two women of Southeast Asian descent. The collection features compelling storytelling that troubles the borders of categorization and reflects the multilayered experience of Southeast Asian women. The diverse voices featured here have been shaped by colonization, wars, globalization, and militarization. For some of these women on the margins of the margin, crafting and showing their work is a bold act in itself. Their provocative and accessible creations tell unique stories, provide a sharp contrast to familiar stereotypes--Southeast Asian women as exotic sex symbols, dragon ladies, prostitutes, and "bar girls"--and serve as entry points for broader discussions on questions of history, memory, and identity. Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University; Lan Duong is associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside; Mariam B. Lam is associate professor of comparative literature, media and cultural studies, and director of Southeast Asian studies, at the University of California, Riverside; and Kathy L. Nguyen is a writer and editor in San Francisco. "This book will have a major impact in multiple fields with an intersectional and nuanced evaluation that brings together race, gender, nation, labor, and migration. Timely, productive, provocative, and incontrovertibly interdisciplinary, it will expand the current purview of Southeast Asian/American literary studies."--Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice "Troubling Borders gathers an amazing number of powerful selections of literary writing and visual art. I am struck by how moving, how political, how diverse these selections are. They bear witness to the hauntings of empire and fill gaps in our understanding of the life and imagination of Southeast Asian women. I am awed by this collection."--Nguyen-vo Thu-huong, author of The Ironies of Freedom

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

Troubling Borders

In the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud probes the complexities of Vietnamese American identity and politics. She provides an analytical introduction to the literature, showing how generational differences play out in genre and text. In addition, she asks, can the term Vietnamese American be disassociated from representations of the war without erasing its legacy? Pelaud delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains of the writing as well as the critical receptions and responses to them. She moves beyond the common focus on the Vietnam war to develop an interpretive framework that integrates post-colonialism with the multi-generational refugee, immigrant, and transnational experiences at the center of Vietnamese American narratives. Her readings of key works, such as Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge show how trauma, racism, class and gender play a role in shaping the identities of Vietnamese American characters and narrators.

History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature

This Is All I Choose to Tell

Hanif Abdurraqib

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau

Terry Tempest Williams

Joy Harjo

Alexandria Peary

Roberto Tejada

Joseph Drew Lanham

Four

Lan Duong

Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a "leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America." The sixty-two contributors have been shaped by colonization, wars, globalization, and militarization. For some of these women on the margins of the margin, crafting and showing their work is a bold act in itself. Their provocative and accessible creations tell unique stories, provide sharp contrasts to familiar stereotypes--Southeast Asian women as exotic sex symbols, dragon ladies, prostitutes, or "bar girls"--and serve as entry points for broader discussions about questions of history, memory, and identity.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

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