Settlers amongst us! Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, ‘Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer’, Melus, 2020 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers amongst us! Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, ‘Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer’, Melus, 2020

07Nov20

Excerpt: Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the eponymous first-person narrator in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) is processed in a refugee camp on the US unincorporated territory of Guam before resettling in Southern California. There, he is invited by a famous Hollywood director, modeled after Francis Ford Coppola but identified only as “the Auteur” in the novel, to attest to the ethnic authenticity of The Hamlet. In this Vietnam War film—Nguyen’s stand-in for Apocalypse Now (1979)—a blonde Green Beret is tasked…

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