Post-Socialism and Literary Dubbing

• In Event: 270. Socialist Narratives from Laos and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary authors—Hữu Nam Đoàn and Đỗ Bích Thúy—have absorbed ethnic minority languages and identities into Vietnam’s national language and literature during globalization, contrasting these recent representations with works published by Nguyên Ngọc and Ma Văn Kháng during the anticolonial revolution and war eras. I examine how political policies and literary representations of ethnic minorities have changed as Vietnam has moved away from socialist aesthetics towards market socialism.

The paper focuses on a crucial mechanism of national literature: what I term “literary dubbing.” This form of translation refers to the authorial practice of dubbing over characters’ thoughts and speech from one language in to another language. The language that the reader encounters on the page is not the language that conditions characters’ modes of thinking, manners of observations, and instinctive responses. This fictional translation aims for cultural authenticity and national communication, but it does so, problematically, at the expense of linguistic authenticity. While literary dubbing was once a crucial feature of Vietnam’s anticolonial nationalism and its literature, the paper argues, it has become instrumental to contemporary literature as a way to map particular cultural identities. Through recent
literary dubbing of ethnic minorities in to the Vietnamese language and literature, I trace Vietnam’s shifting understanding of literature’s relationship to national politics, as well as the assimilation—or the failure of assimilation—of cultural differences into the national body and language.

Author

• Ben V. Tran, Vanderbilt University