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Expanding the Southscape to the Global South: Remapping History and Afro-Vietnamese Intimacy in Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2020
- pp. 79-93
- 10.1353/afa.2020.0014
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay explores the Cold War geopolitics of Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau by foregrounding the poet's depictions of Afro-Vietnamese relations. It shows how Komunyakaa maps an inventive geography of Afro-Vietnamese solidarity by reconfiguring literal and figurative distances between the U.S. South and Vietnam. In so doing, Komunyakaa charts a new spatial formation, the global southscape, that enables readers to envision new forms of cross-racial and cross-national affinity.