Date of Award
Spring 6-2025
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Matt Hooley
Second Advisor
Melanie B. Taylor
Abstract
Recent scholarship on contemporary American literature has asked how representations of cross-racial relationships can restore the blotted-out stories and experiences of minoritized individuals in the United States. This essay incorporates and expands upon the theorization of cross-racial relationships to read across several fields, developing a macroscopic framework around relationships represented in contemporary multiethnic literature that confront the oppressive systems embedded in the American nation-building process. Drawing upon the work of scholars like Lisa Lowe, I define the concept of “untraditional intimacies” as relationships between people who share similarly lived experiences as those who have been most directly affected by America's racialization and settler colonialism. These untraditional intimacies may extend across race, across colonial borders, across time, and/or beyond heteronormativity to challenge prominent representations of relationships in America that segregate and erase racialized peoples. I apply this concept to Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003) and to Vietnamese American Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) to analyze how the untraditional intimacies in these novels-in-verse are relationships that “re-pair” ongoing narratives of racialization and settler colonialism across the contemporary United States and beyond. This essay also theorizes the American “Frontier” as any space that reinforces American narratives of racialization and settler colonialism. When the Frontier becomes a moveable space no longer tethered to the nineteenth-century American West, it creates a way scholars can analyze, track, and compare how these narratives have had similar or different impacts from nation to nation, region to region, relationship to relationship, or person to person. In a “reverse American expansion,” I argue Vuong’s work situated in New England takes readers back to a region where American colonization began centuries earlier, revealing how it has only continued to function as this Frontier space. On the other hand, Vizenor’s work speaks to how the American West continues to exist as this Frontier at the same time Japan has also become an American Frontier with American imperialism.
Recommended Citation
Fiala, Crista Diane, "“Untraditional Intimacies:” Re-Pairing American Narratives of Racialization and Settler Colonialism in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) and Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003)" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 194.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/194
Included in
Asian American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Native American Studies Commons
