Abstract
Abstract This thesis discusses Trinh T. Minh-ha’s politics of cultural identities in her Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and A Tale of Love (1995). I examine how Trinh problematizes the “objectivity” claims in relation to official historical discourses. In this reason, I find diaspora studies helpful in illustrating how Trinh searches new interpretation— rather than re-presentation— of Vietnamese cultural identities. The thesis is in four chapters. Chapter 1 reviews current scholarships in relation to Trinh’s films. Critics loosely argue that Trinh provides unheard histories of Vietnamese women to challenge the hegemony (Kracki 54; Nam 82). However, there are also suspicions that the East is still not an interlocutor but a silent other in Trinh’s films (Desmond 155; Wide Angle 113). These critics or scholars pay less attention on the issue of subaltern Vietnamese women in diaspora, which will be discussed in Chapter two. Chapter 2 will focus on Trinh’s strategy of breaking the authenticity in Surname Viet. Traditionally Vietnam is mentioned in terms of the dual conflict between North and South. However, in Surname Viet, Trinh puts three different Vietnamese accents along with three English accents to illustrate a much more complicated situation of Vietnamese people. However, we need to ask: in selecting historical materials, what are the criteria and principles of significant truth? And, to follow up on Spivak, can the Vietnamese women subaltern speak? If they can, in what way can these voices be heard? If not, why did Trinh try to represent or re-present them? Furthermore, why did Trinh choose Vietnamese immigrants to perform these interviews that suffer from double movement and displacement? Besides, why are they translated from French to English? Why not in Vietnamese? How do these diasporic experiences influence and change the meaning of history? These questions will relate to the film A Tale of Love in Chapter three. Chapter 3 further explores the discussion in Chapter 2. In A Tale of Love, Trinh points out the diasporic Vietnamese’s identities, and the unstable characteristics of histories. In A Tale of Love (1995), Trinh changes the setting of the national epic poem The Tale of Kieu from traditional Vietnam into the present the United States to illustrate the double exploitation that the diaspora women have encounter even if they situate themselves in the “free West.” I examine what meanings and interpretations Trinh brings out from the film, and how traditional historical meanings in this poem change. Chapter 4 offers my conclusion. By examining Trinh’s textual structure to blur the boundaries that the diasporas maintain to keep their racial purity, the thesis will argue that Trinh try to resist the Western gaze by returning it. However, how does this gaze work? In what way does it return the gaze from the First World to resist its domination? These questions will be raised in my last chapter.