Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12469742 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sally E McWilliams (corresponding author), Sally McWilliams |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 315-348 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Asian American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1096-8598 • E-ISSN: 1097-2129 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jaas.2019.0039 |
| OpenAlex | W2986321691 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 13 |
The Best We Could Do is a multilayered feminist interrogation into the power of affective connections and knowledge for second-generation Vietnamese in the United States. I argue that Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir uses techniques of cotemporality, the intertwining of event and insidious trauma, and the performativity of memory through the visual technologies of maps and photographs to destabilize the rhetorics and realities of U.S. exceptionalism and assimilation. Her memoir questions the promise of freedom and refuses to adhere to a cultural politics of forgetting for those in the diaspora. The Best We Could Do recontextualizes intergenerational trauma, gender, and cultural identity, producing an alternative configuration of subjectivity, history, and futurity for Vietnamese diasporic subjects. In this way the text demands that readers interrogate the seemingly static images and discourses that inform our ideas of freedom, agency, and history in the post–Việt Nam War era and their impact on Vietnamese American futurity
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Cognitive psychology · Diaspora · Epistemology · Forgetting · Identity (music · Linguistics · Memoir · Performativity · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Vietnamese · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
Loss
Tangled Memories
The Gift of Freedom
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Layering history
The Colonial Choreographies of Refugee Resettlement in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge
Ucla Common Book Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do
A Success Worse Than Failure
Alien Encounters
A View from the Vietnamese Diaspora
Illustrated Connections
The Civil Contract of Photography
Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |