2025 Theses Doctoral

Writing in Décalage: Fractured Memory and Generational Distance in Diasporic Voices from Argentina and Viet Nam

Devautour Choi, Jeanne

Bringing together contemporary Argentine-born and Vietnamese-born diasporic authors, this dissertation seeks to conceptualize as a generation-specific mode of writing the narrative distancing devices and fragmented æsthetics they mobilize to revisit literarily the historical violence they experienced as children in highly autobiographical texts hovering at the edges of fiction and testimony. Across its chapters, this work examines a corpus of self-reflective memory narratives by authors who, born in the late 1960s or early 1970s, are part of a 1.5 Generation with respect to, on the one hand, the 1976-1983 Argentine military dictatorship (Laura Alcoba and Patricio Pron) and, on the other hand, both the 1955-1975 War in Viet Nam and the large-scale exodus by sea of the so-called "boat people" that unfolded in its aftermath (Andrew X. Pham and Kim Thúy).

Written from countries, and in languages, foreign to their authors' experiences of the traumatic periods they look back at with a twenty- to thirty-year retrospective gaze —a spatial, linguistic, and temporal remoteness— these texts display, as I show, a shared commitment to restoring relationality where violence and exile have imposed rupture. I contend that, beyond using fragmented forms to navigate the intimate and societal fragmentation they experienced in childhood, these authors interweave discrepant spatio-temporal strata and disrupt narratorial authority and consistency to play with the multiple layers of distance that characterize their relationship with early memories of historical violence.

Together, these case studies delineate a poetics of non-coincidence and of deliberate dissonance that, emerging in resistance to dynamics of erasure and forgetting at play in post- conflict societies, confronts the fractures that such violence inscribes in one's memory, identity, and sense of belonging. This project articulates décalage as an æsthetic practice for undoing and troubling imposed and internalized logics of compartmentalization, unsettling continuity and narrative unity by introducing friction between voices, languages, spaces, and temporalities in a writing that does not seek to resolve misalignment, but rather to stage and work through it.