Memory, Insidious trauma, and Refugee crisis in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015)

Abstract

This article argues that refugee crises include complex forms of insidious and latent trauma, insufficiently engaged in dominant discourses of trauma studies which largely draw on Western models and cultural experiences, often overlooking various aspects of postcolonial trauma, trauma due to casual violence and racism, and other forms of everyday marginalization which are interstitial, experiential, and quotidian in quality. Through a historical examination of the America-Vietnam War and its subsequent diasporic subject-formations, we aim to offer an original reading of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) using a complex framework of memory studies that highlights an interplay of nostalgia, spectrality, and posttraumatic stress manifestations. The study argues how trauma may be examined as a quotidian and experiential phenomenon of slow disintegration emerging from a profoundly political context, and how the medium of fiction offers a unique cognitive, affective, and focal framework to articulate and empathize with the same.