Alternative Historical Tetherings: Wilbur Wright, George Moses Horton, and Virginia Dare in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

Abstract

This article argues that, in her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, Monique Truong writes against the militaristic and traumatic overdeterminations of the Vietnam War faced by Vietnamese American writers. Offering an analysis of Truong’s incorporation and revision of three historical figures, Wilbur Wright, George Moses Horton, and Virginia Dare, from her source text North Carolina Parade, I argue that Truong tethers her narrative to migratory and deterritorialized rather than geographically fixed precursors, claims a queer and affective rather than ancestral lineage, and sources her narrative energy in utopian flux rather than traumatic destruction or exclusive nationalisms.