Expanding the Southscape to the Global South: Remapping History and Afro-Vietnamese Intimacy in Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau

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.