ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the racialization of Asians and specifically of the Vietnamese in America within contexts of affective racialization in the US. The outlining of a genealogy of racial categorization and othering as well as the “affects of racialization” (Blickstein, 2019) reveals the ways in which affective publics centered around hate, anger, shame, and resentment are formed and sustained. The formation of these publics has historical resonances that manifest in everyday acts (such as the attack on Vilma Kari mentioned below) as well as in mass acts of organized violence (such as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol). With specific reference to Vietnamese Americans, it is shown how their presence in the US brings to the fore contested legacies and memories of the Vietnam War, a war that the US lost but cannot fully acknowledge as such; and how the Vietnamese body serves as a reminder of these difficult pasts that leach into the present. It is within these contexts of shameful pasts and hate-filled publics that the chapter analyzes Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On earth we are briefly gorgeous to foreground the affective densities of Vietnamese lives in America.
