Part 1
Critical Reflection: Exploring The Gangster We Are All Looking For
1) Ethnic Studies Professor Yen Lê Espiritu writes the following:
By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive wars between western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. U.S. military policies— search and destroy missions in the South, carpet bombing raids in the North, free-fire zones, and chemical defoliation— cost Vietnam at least three million lives, the maiming of countless bodies, the poisoning of its water, land, and air, the razing of its countryside, and the devastation of most of its infrastructure. Indeed, more explosives were dropped on Vietnam, a country two-thirds the size of California, than in all of World War II. Thirty years (1945-1975) of warfare destruction, coupled with another twenty years of post-war U.S. trade and aid economic embargo, shattered Vietnam’s economy and society, leaving the country among the poorest in the world and its people scattered to different corners of the globe. Yet post-1975 public discussions of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history. This “skipping over” of the Vietnam War constitutes an organized and strategic forgetting of a war that “went wrong,” enabling “patriotic” Americans to push military intervention as key in America’s self-appointed role as liberators—protectors of democracy, liberty and equality, both at home and abroad.
— Yen Lê Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARd: The Endings that are Not Over,” Amerasia Journal 31:2 (2005): xiii-xxiii.
How do you see the novel engaging with this history of “skipping over” the war in Vietnam? Do you think the novel is participating in this public forgetting? Working against it? What aspects of the novel help you come to your answers?
[Your answer should be approximately 200-300 words.]
2) Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity writes the following:
I knew the fathers and mothers of my father and mother only through their photographs, in which they never smiled and posed stiffly. Visiting the homes of other Vietnamese friends, I always paused to study the photographs of their relatives, invariably captured in black and white. These photographs, emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and, in many cases, of lost people, were universal signs of our place in the world as refugees, found in every household as keepsakes of memory, hallowed signs of our haunting by the past. Photographs are the secular imprints of ghosts, the most visible sign of their aura, and the closest many in the world of refugees could come to living with those left behind. For many refugees, the clothes on their backs and a wallet full of photographs were all the things they carried with them on their flight. In the strange new land they found themselves, these photographs transubstantiated into symbols of the missing themselves, as in le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The narrator’s mother keeps the only treasured photograph of her own mother and father safe in the attic. When their home is demolished to pave the way for gentrification and the family is evicted, the mother forgets to take the photograph with her in the family’s frantic attempt to rescue their belongings. Watching the destruction of her home, the mother calls out to her lost parents, “Ma/Ba.” The narrator, a child, listens to her mother’s cry and thinks of the world as “two butterfly wings rubbing against my ear. Listen . . . they are sitting in the attic, sitting like royalty. Shining in the dark, buried by a wrecking ball. Paper fragments floating across the surface of the sea. There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this” (le thi diem thuy 2004, 99).
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006) 7-37
How does this critical reflection on the importance of photography within refugee and immigrant communities add to your reading of the novel? Do you see other ways in which this theme is addressed in the novel?
[Your answer should be approximately 200-300 words.]
Part 2
For your assigned week only, please use the following guide to help you compose THREE Critical Discussion Questions of your own for your assigned text(s). I will then choose some of the questions to help shape our class discussion.
Brief Guide to Critical Discussion Questions
Critical Discussion questions are intended to open up and complicate our reading, to expand our understandings and interpretations, to make connections between and among texts, and to challenge us to consider ideas and readings we might not have explored otherwise. Your critical questions should develop from your (close) reading of and critical thinking about the texts and their relationship to the rest of our course (and to the world beyond our course). While reading you should not only be thinking about questions you want to ask about the text but also about questions the text encourages you to ask. As you compose your questions, be careful to stick to the texts and the issues they raise and to questions that we can answer in our course; in other words, don’t ask large, speculative questions that push us far outside of our course reading and thinking or that would require a great deal of extra research.
Guidelines:
A critical discussion question…
* Should be more than “What does _____ mean?” They should engage how the text is making meaning. What kinds of cultural definitions does it utilize? What important claims does it make? What are the stakes of these claims?
* Should be in the form of “How might…” or “Why…” and you should have a speculative answer to your own question in mind. Critical questions may—in fact, should—have multiple possible answers, but you should always have some thoughtful potential answer(s) ready for discussion.
* Should attempt to further class discussion, to open up areas of the text(s) that you think are (or might be) important for our course, and to enhance our collective understanding of the reading.
Examples of not-so-strong discussion questions:
“Why do you think Toni Morrison wrote this book?”
“Have you ever experienced the kind of sexism we see in this book?”
Examples of strong Critical Discussion Questions:
“Much of Sula focuses on the intersections of race and gender (and racial and gender oppression) as they play out in the experiences of Nel and Sula and other Black women. How do you see this at work in the novel? How do Nel and Sula respond to racialized and gendered norms differently? How do the chapter titles—each signifying a different year—add to your understanding of the novel’s approach to race and gender?”
“The vignettes or meditations that make up Citizen: An American Lyric are primarily written in the voice of unnamed, first-person speakers (all the “I’s” in the text) speaking to a variety of “You’s” thoughout the text. How does this use of I/You impact your understanding of the text? As a reader, do you feel yourself implication in the narratives being shared? How does the text position itself in relation to its audience (or audiences)?”
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