Alter /native: Imagining and performing the native woman in Francophone and Vietnamese literature.

Abstract

Using the models of the native proposed by such postcolonial scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Rey Chow, this dissertation attempts to find a new model of the native woman as she is represented in postcolonial Francophone Vietnamese literature and contemporary literature from Vietnam. Most postcolonial models of the native concentrate upon a mythical image of the native. As Albert Memmi argues, the legitimacy of colonization depends on the colonized's acceptance of his own portrait as it is painted by others. I examine the ways in which this image is constructed from cliches and stereotypes that are enforced upon the native by the dominant culture in which she exists (either France or Vietnam). I further propose the alter/native of viewing the native as nothing more than simulacrum: the imaginary (or image-inary) native. The imaginary native is aware of the constructed and simulated nature of her own identity as native as such, and uses this awareness to destabilize the very system that attempts to enforce it (her identity as native) upon her. In exposing her own constructedness, her own status as a product of culture, the imaginary native at the same time refuses and escapes the gaze of authority (be it colonial or native), which can no longer lay a claim upon her. In this way, the imaginary native is granted the agency that previous models of the native have lacked. In this dissertation I examine several figurations of native Vietnamese women in an attempt to locate this alter/native in the works of contemporary Vietnamese women writers, both those who write in French---namely Kim Lefevre, Linda Le, and Anna Moi---and those who write in Vietnamese, including Pha&dotbelow;m Thi&dotbelow; Hoai, Ly Lan, Le Minh Khue, and Cong Ton Huye`n.