Reeducating The Sympathizer: Refugee Aesthetics and Intertextuality Recode the Western Canon

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Caroline Rody’s “Between ‘I’ and ‘We:’ Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Interethnic Multitudes” and Yogita Goyal’s “Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War” for discussions about interethnic influences for The Sympathizer.

2. Espiritu notes that her use of “complex personhood” stems from Avery Gordon’s use of the phrase in Ghostly Matters: Hauntings and the Sociological Imagination (4). Her use of “intentionalized being” comes from Sherry Ortner’s “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal” (187).

3. In Departures, epistemic disobedience is discussed as a kind of ungrateful resistance to humanitarian narratives, which builds off of Walter Mignolo’s argument in “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom”

4. The latter portion of this statement applies Espiritu’s framework for moving toward a critical refugee study to my analytical approach of the novel (Body 11).

5. For a more detailed discussion about humanism in Hamlet, see Rhodri Lewis’ Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness.

6. For a more detailed discussion about the different generations of Vietnamese American writers, see Isabelle Thuy Pelaud’s This Is All I Choose to Tell.

7. From Greek Σοφία, “Sofia” means wisdom. In the novel, Sofia’s character functions as a lover of wisdom. In the narrator’s perspective, she has chosen incorrectly by loving Sonny instead.

8. The idea of trying to freeze the temporality of the political designation of refugees is influenced by August’s discussion about “the refugee position” (56).

9. This statement plays off of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question in “Can the subaltern speak?”

10. The phrasing in this sentence plays off of Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

11. This analysis is inspired by August’s reading of Hamid’s Exit West as he discusses a different kind of refugee mapping and landscape (66).

12. For a deeper analysis of conventional refugee images, see August’s chapter on “The Refugee Image”

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Hilda Hue Ma

Hilda Hue Ma is a Professor in the English department at Saint Mary’s College of California. She teaches courses on early modern British literature, Asian American literature, literary theory, and for the Ethnic Studies, Women & Gender Studies, and Collegiate Seminar programs. Her scholarship has been featured in collections such as Routledge’s Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe: Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama and The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.