Nam Nguyen is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in French at Yale University. His dissertation investigates conceptualizations of Asia and Asianness in the literature of Marguerite Duras, Linda Lê, Marie NDiaye, and Antoine Volodine – authors whom he argues magnify the foreignness of Asia to disrupt Eurocentric thought. He is interested in exploring new textual and conceptual frameworks for Asia that would take into account its unstable anature, rejecting the orienting markers with which Eurocentric thought has long contented itself in order to decipher and dominate the continent. He is also fascinated by the new forms of care and community between whom he calls “subjectivities without Orientation,” tied together by their lack of Orientation within an unknowable world.
