OPPRESSION AND TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA IN OCEAN VUONG’S ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
OPPRESSION AND TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA IN OCEAN VUONG’S ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), first and foremost as a life testimony. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub define life testimony as a “point of conflation between text and life […] a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life” (Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 1992). The theoretical framework is based on trauma studies, specifically on transgenerational trauma, as well as the studies which deal with autobiographies and autobiographical fiction, so that this fictionalised account of the author’s own life could be read as a life testimony depicting real-life traumatic events. The main focus of the paper are the characters in the novel, who are traumatised due to the oppression based on their race, gender, sexuality, and class. We argue that the main cohesive tissue of Vuong’s novel is transgenerational trauma which becomes a major element of characterisation.

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