Kinotextuality in Matt Huynh’s The Boat

Abstract

Matt Huynh’s The Boat (2015), an interactive digital adaptation of Nam Le’s short story of the same name (2008), follows the story of a young Vietnamese boat migrant to explore the dilemma of belonging in migrant and refugee flight. While Le’s text details narratives of refugee flight, Huynh’s multimodal rendition translates the narrative of boat migration into an interactive, multisensory aesthetic mode that simulates the experience of boat passage on the ocean as well as the online viewer’s sense of a boat approaching national shores. In this article, I develop the concept of kinotextuality, an aesthetics of movement that renders the border generative and creative. I demonstrate that the literary imagination offers a conception of the border not merely as the limited space of the nation but as a space for reimagining the idea of human rights and protection.