Perspective as Geopolitics: Narration and the Many Global Vietnams

Abstract

Although perspective as a narrative category is sometimes treated as a technical issue for the writer, increasingly contemporary fiction coming from the United States must be read in terms of geopolitics, given the history of American hegemony and the move in US writing toward global settings. A poetics of peripheralization approach best facilitates this type of reading, since it addresses the political dimension of literature's more formal properties. Reading US literature against global cultural production is also essential. This article takes the history of Vietnam's decolonization as its test case. Narratives dealing with this history by Moroccan Abdallah Saaf, US-based Franco-Austrian Bernard Fall, and Korean Hwang Sok-yong here provide a context for reading perspective in Vietnam novels by Tim O'Brien as inherently political. My claim here is that the American experience in Southeast Asia should be read within a genealogy of American imperialism that incorporates the cultural dimension by placing limits on the textual use of perspective.