Fighting against Post-Colonial Optimism: In Search of Subaltern and Diasporic Agency in Vietnamese American Fiction

Abstract

The late eighties and early nineties saw the publication of such works as The Empire Strikes Back (1989) and The Location of Culture (1994). Despite their crucial influence on the development of postcolonial theory, these works contributed to an idealization of the post-colonial subject—a trend that continues to this day embodied by Ashcroft’s horizonal space. They enthusiastically answer Spivak that, indeed, the subaltern can speak. However, The Book of Salt by Monique Truong and Linh Dinh’s short stories ‘!’ and ‘Prisoner with a Dictionary’ fight openly against this post-colonial optimism. Through an eclectic approach to these Vietnamese American works, which combines diasporic and post-structuralist theories, I question the usefulness of Ashcroft’s concepts of horizonal space and transnation and Bhabha’s notions of interstices and third space in representing the subaltern condition. While Ashcroft and Bhabha highly praise any attempt by the colonized to resist colonial hegemony and celebrate the state of ‘in-betweenness, ‘ I caution that these ‘spaces’, these ‘interstices’ are not inviolable; they do not operate in isolation, but they are challenged by other, possibly differently constituted ‘spaces’. I prove this by analyzing the interplay of identity modalities, in this case language and colonization, in the three texts.