Abstract

Abstract:

This article develops an analytic of torture to read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel The Sympathizer beyond its narrative time surrounding the US war in Vietnam. By focusing on Nguyen’s description and uses of torture in the text, the article locates the period’s gender-, sexuality-, and race-based violence as part of an ongoing genealogy of US state-sanctioned torture, predicated upon Orientalist assumptions about pain, sexuality, and humanity. Specifically, the article reads the narrator’s forced confession and his use of staged photographs to torture others in dialogue with the 2004 photographs documenting prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Nguyen’s novel emerged a decade later amid debate on the use of torture, only one year after the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its “Torture Report,” condemning the inhumane interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib. By having his characters draw on US training materials and advisors to implement torture practices infamously replicated decades later, Nguyen demonstrates that United States-led torture is not an exception, but rather state policy. Nguyen’s novel excavates these teleologies of racialized violence in the United States for popular audiences and puts forth a sharp historical critique of US racialized violence and militarized intervention.

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