The 2024 Phil Lind Initiative continues with Viet Thanh Nguyen

On March 14, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, MacArthur Genius and refugee advocate Viet Thank Nguyen dives into his talk Speaking for an Other moderated by Dr. Christopher B. Patterson. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s writing is bold, elegant, and fiercely honest. His remarkable debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize, was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, and made the finalist list for the PEN/Faulkner award. Coming to the US as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975, he was driven by lack of representation to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective—globally reimagining what we thought we knew about the conflict. Now, almost a decade since his groundbreaking novel was published, Viet revisits the developing conversations on the polemic and polarizing narratives facing migrants in the US today with his Phil Lind Initiative talk titled Speaking for an Other. As displaced individuals contend with the physical perils of war, we consider a different conflict that has emerged within the global imaginary: how has storytelling been used by some to build a new sense of community within the United States, while being leveraged by other segments of American society to efface them? With time and memory dislocated, how do narratives have the potential to be wielded as both refuge and subterfuge in the United States of both today and tomorrow?