Mardi 11 juin 2024, 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, salle 126 Saint-Charles 1 et en visioconférence.

Séminaire organisé par Raphaël Ricaud dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Doris Witt (Department of English, University of Iowa, exchange).

This presentation aims to be accessible to anyone who is interested in Anglophone Vietnamese literature, particularly work by Vietnamese Americans.  It will unfold in three phases.  Part I, History, meditates on the theme of history—the history of Việt Nam, certainly, but also my history teaching literature and film about the country at a large university in the midwestern United States.  In addition to explaining how my experiences in the classroom have informed a new research project that I have launched this spring, I hope this section is useful for listeners who are invested in pedagogy.  Part II, Archives, reframes the history and teaching motifs via a brief overview of the development of the Vietnamese American literary tradition over the past several decades.  This section acknowledges not only the ubiquity of academic discourse about the concept of the “archive” but also some of the factors I am weighing as I work to delimit mine, including the role of censorship in Việt Nam and, increasingly, the United States as well.  Part III, Hungry Ghosts, turns to my emerging area of interest within this archive, which is how and why different generations of Anglophone Vietnamese writers have used their creative work to represent the country’s environmental, agricultural, and alimentary history and grapple with its complicated legacies.  It is by now a commonplace to describe Việt Nam as haunted, a land full of Wandering Souls.  References to this spectral presence permeate the literature.  As a case study, I will discuss Anglophone Vietnamese writing about the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944-45.  To the best of my current knowledge, creative work by overseas Vietnamese has not been incorporated into the official government archive constructed to memorialize the famine.  I hope to help remedy that omission. 

Présentation de l’intervenante: Doris Witt grew up in Glasgow, Kentucky, and holds a BA in English from Centre College, an MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and a JD from the University of Iowa.  She specializes in post-WWII multiethnic American and transnational / postcolonial literature and culture.

Lien zoom pour suivre ce séminaire à distance : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/96799630832?pwd=3M6PldtgickJ5J6lmR7fsDxNeXgtjP.1