The Refugee, Recently

Souvankham Thammavongsa, Philip Huynh, and The Aesthetics of Heterogeneity

Abstract

Looking specifically at Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife and Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City, I show how each piece leverages, what Ming Tiampo has called, the “aesthetics of heterogeneity” to articulate how refugee collectivities exists beyond state designations. Written from and about different Southeast Asian communities, as well as belonging to differing immigrant “waves,” both texts present a plurality of voices, with various interests, perspectives, and drives. This approach contrasts the singularity that has positioned Southeast Asian Canadian refugees as the stable exemplary subject needed for Canadian national mythologies to be formed. A contemporary aesthetic of heterogeneity intervenes in imaginings of the Canadian social milieu, where refugee authors illustrate the different structures of knowledge created by refugee lives, without having to represent and give up to the reader exactly what the refugee life is.