The Re-seen Past: Refugee Stories and Postmemorial Revisionism in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The article examines instances of Vietnamese refugee storytelling and their potential to challenge exclusionary and discriminatory discourses surrounding the Vietnam War through an analysis of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Using the theoretical framework of re-storying, proposed by Critical Refugee Studies (CRS), we look at intergenerational storytelling in On Earth as a collaborative memory-making process capable of resisting the discursive marginalization of Vietnamese refugees in the USA. The storytelling sessions between Little Dog, the protagonist, and his grandmother Lan lead to the formation of postmemory. The article also finds that through the novel’s first-person narrator, Little Dog, Vuong implements a strategy that we term “postmemorial revisionism” – using parental memories as alternative historical knowledge to offer subaltern perspectives of a state-appropriated cultural phenomenon. In On Earth, Little Dog’s postmemory entails a revisionist strategy by which certain public images from the American cultural discourses, archives, and productions on the Vietnam War are rewritten with his grandmother’s and mother’s life stories. It thus becomes a means to engage with discriminatory narratives and resist neocolonial discourses of exclusion.