Language and Trauma in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Little Dog, the narrator of Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, learns to be strategic in his use of language as a means of self-preservation.
Ocean Vuong
The Dawn of the Queer Ecological Novel
The need for a queer ecological novel is increasingly apparent, as it becomes difficult to imagine any story, any life, unaffected by the reality of climate change.
The Power of Reading
For Ocean Vuong, Jesmyn Ward, and Jaquira Diaz, reading and writing became necessities early on when their classrooms, families, and streets confined them, left them feeling othered and uncertain of their identities.
The Audacity of Canon Building
Two scholar friends of mine who work in the very broad and sometimes amorphous field of the digital humanities curated a show last year at UC Berkeley called “No Legacy.” Among the goals of the curators Élika Ortega & Alex Saum-Pascual was the disruption of the notion ingrained in many of us in graduate school that…