Thuyen Viet Truong

Thuyen Viet Truong (he/him) is a doctoral student in the Department of English with general interests in world literature and the Global South, diaspora and decolonization, Asia-Pacific and African literatures. His research centers on Cold War cultural diplomacies—from para-literary organizations to international awards, from writers’ conferences to book programs—and explores how they re-inscribe the ethos of past civilizing missions only to re-incarnate into developmentalist practices and policies in the twenty-first century. A through-line is Afro-Asianism, not solely as cultural alliance and political solidarity, but also how and why the literatures of Asia animate and agitate a range of transformative movements in Africa, from Négritude to Pan-Africanism to African socialism. Future projects include (1) charting the legacy of lesser-known proxy wars of the Cold War, such as the Malayan Emergency and the Angolan Bush War, and (2) reading Anglophone South/East Asian literature and Indigenous Pacific Islander writings in relations: comparison, companion, convergence.