“Minor Revolutions”: Beyond Postmemory at EAAS 2026 (Bologna)

From 1 to 4 September 2026, I took part in the 36th Biennial Conference of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS), “1776–2026: Visions of Freedom,” held at the University of Bologna.

Together with David Owen and Nicholas Spengler, I presented the roundtable “Minor Revolutions: Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Unmaking of American Freedom,” which examined how the Vietnamese American writer and scholar challenges dominant American narratives of freedom, particularly what critic Phuong Tran Nguyen calls the post-Vietnam “politics of rescue”: the expectation that Vietnamese refugees repay their admission to the United States with gratitude and uncritical silence.

We took Nguyen’s recent Norton Lectures, published as To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other (2024), as our starting point. Across the three papers, we approached refugeehood as a standpoint from which the exclusions embedded in national narratives of liberty become visible. Nguyen’s notion of the “minor” — the vulnerable, marginalised or dismissed subject — offered us a shared framework for thinking about forms of freedom emerging from histories of displacement and violence.

David Owen’s paper, “Drivers, Detours, and Detonations: Unfreedom and Masculinity in ‘Someone Else Besides You’”, examined patriarchal domination and limited forms of resistance within the Vietnamese American family, reading responsibility and care as tentative alternatives to inherited models of masculine authority. Nicholas Spengler’s “Sympathy for ‘Nothing’: Doubleness and Freedom in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer” focused on double consciousness in the novel and its unsettling reworking of “independence and freedom”, asking how sympathy might emerge from violence and dispossession.

My paper, “Ghosts of Freedom: Just Memory in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘Black-Eyed Women’”, read haunting as an ethical form of remembrance. I focused on the narrator’s movement from repression and the expectation of refugee gratitude towards what Nguyen calls “just memory”, asking whether freedom might lie in becoming answerable to the traumatic past rather than leaving it behind.

The roundtable also opened up a broader question that I would like to pursue further within the Beyond Postmemory project: how refugee narratives might challenge models of transmission structured mainly around generational memory, and offer other ways of thinking about displacement, memory and freedom.