POST-COLONIAL MEMORY, CARE, AND EVERYDAY VIOLENCE IN OCEAN VUONG’S THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS: REIMAGINING THE MINORITIZED SUBJECT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17828264Keywords:
Ocean Vuong, Post-Colonial Memory, Everyday Violence, Care Ethics, Minoritized Subject, Immigrant Literature, Trauma, IdentityAbstract
This article analyzes the portrayal of postcolonial memory, care, and violence in everyday life in The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Vuong’s poems, which are for a large part based on the immigrant experience, reveal the shattered ego of the underprivileged minority in the aftermath of war, displacement and generational trauma. The writer delves into the issue of how Vuong reinterprets care not simply as emotional comfort but as an act of resistance within the process of post-colonial identity reconstruction. The use of close reading in conjunction with post-colonial and affect theories allows the researcher to investigate the transformation of personal sorrow into communal remembrance in Vuong’s poetry. The author comes to the conclusion that Vuong gives voice to a tender poetics in the midst of historical violence thus turning weakness into a means of survival and political expression. At last, The Emperor of Gladness places the oppressed subject not as a passive victim but as a history re-narrator who takes back his/her power through the means of art and caring.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Myra Ikram, Faiza Ikram, Zakra Nadeem (Author)
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