Ocean vuong
![ocean vuong ocean vuong](https://www.macfound.org/media/fellows/profile_photos/vuong_2019_profile-240.jpg)
The Geneva Convention inserted ‘the refugee’ into international law within the context of asylum as guaranteed by national governments. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees, Cambridge, 2004. Malkki, ‘Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 1995, pp.
![ocean vuong ocean vuong](https://24hkto1dz1v3ddyf93n0ye45-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Ocean_Vuong-e1602507378397-350x524.jpg)
Marfleet, ‘Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past,’ Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26, 2007, pp. giving orders to his mother, leading a council of men, venturing outside of his home for the first time, learning about guest–host relations), but ultimately only fully achieves it with his father’s help as the two fight off the suitors side-by-side.
#Ocean vuong series
As Telemachus embarks on his quest for his father, he also goes through a series of rites of passage to reach manhood (e.g. The Telemachy reveals the impact of war beyond the battlefield as it details the stagnant state of affairs at Odysseus’ home in Ithaca: his wife Penelope has been dutifully waiting for him and warding off suitors who have overrun his home, while his son Telemachus has been paralysed by fear and uncertainty, trapped between boyhood and manhood. Odysseus himself does not appear until Book Five and it is through his son’s journey that the reader/listener is introduced to Odysseus’ wartime legacy. Within Homeric scholarship, the Telemachy refers to the first four books of the Odyssey in which Telemachus goes in search of his father Odysseus who has been missing for ten years after the ten-year Trojan War. Overall, this paper argues that Vuong reworks the Homeric Odyssey in order to create his own ‘postmemories’ of the war that challenge historical erasure by defiantly placing the queer refugee at the centre, rather than the periphery, of an American narrative. Through this queer mythology, Vuong explores the conflicting layers of his intergenerational trauma, which pit refugeehood and queerness not only against each other, but also against Americanness. I demonstrate how Vuong queers the Homeric Odyssey by subverting the canonical narrative: Odysseus returns home dead, leaving Telemachus to explore his inheritance of war as a queer refugee. To build on this scholarship, this paper closely reads three poems (‘Telemachus,’ ‘Trojan,’ and ‘Odysseus Redux’) in Ocean Vuong’s 2017 poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, through the lenses of memory theory and queer of colour critique.
![ocean vuong ocean vuong](https://www.interviewmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Interview_2019_Web_Summer_OceanVuong.jpg)
While that scholarship has yielded important insight, it nevertheless has contributed to the disremembering of Vietnamese people that is at the core of the dominant American subjectivity of the Vietnam War, which relegates Vietnamese people to the margins of history as either enemies or victims – or worse, forgotten. Previous studies on classical reception related to the Vietnam War have overlooked the experiences of Vietnamese communities, whether national or diasporic, as they focussed instead on those of American combat veterans.