Search

The central premise of this article is that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature shifts the temporal and spatial sites, as well as the reading practices, involved in thinking about Vietnamese American literature and subjectivity away from the effects of the so-called Vietnam War and toward a long historical view that compares how Vietnamese actors have accrued, and continue to accrue, worth within differing regimes of global value. With The Book of Salt inching toward canonical status in the Asian American Studies curriculum, it is clear that Monique Truong's work has emerged as a central text of Vietnamese American literature. However, analyzing the novel solely as a work of Asian American literature may, in fact, limit the promise the book holds due to the conventional marketing and reading practices that frequently reduce a heterogeneous collection of Vietnamese American works to a hermeneutic centred around the “Vietnam War.” In contrast, I propose that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature reveals how Truong creates a ground of comparison that reimagines accepted routes of cross-cultural representation, reception, and value. This world literature perspective nudges Vietnamese American writing away from its own shores by delving deep into the history of Vietnamese mobility and reconsiders the multiple promises held within the Vietnamese diasporic past in a way that brings into question a singular construction of the Vietnamese present.

This article examines the production and negotiation of Korean American televisual images in U.S. reality and travel food programs. We explore two different representations of Korean Americanness, the first in CNN’s Parts Unknown and the second in Bravo TV’s Top Chef, to identify the demand for ethnic transformation that Korean Americans face and examine how these trials reanimate the role of Korean Americans on television. We argue that the iconoclastic figure of the “Bad Korean” highlighted in Parts Unknown challenges stereotypical portrayals of Korean Americans by positioning cast members as active and disruptive cultural producers. In our analysis of Top Chef, we focus on the emergence of the “Shifting Korean” to highlight the transformative process demanded by the reality television genre. We conclude by querying the representational possibilities for Korean Americans, asking what claims the “Bad Korean” and “Shifting Korean” can make on cultural authenticity.