“These [essays], carried out as both criticism and autobiography, are my attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.”
That’s Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in his latest collection, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.” The book originated as six lectures that the Pulitzer Prize winner gave for the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series at Harvard University in 2023 and 2024.
Organized into six topics — “On the Double, or Inauthenticity”; “On Speaking for an Other”; “On Palestine and Asia”; “On Crossing Borders”; “On Being Minor”; and “On the Joy of Otherness” — Nguyen explores works of literature that he has found most useful and inspirational in helping him define his worldview, his political and literary aesthetics.
Nguyen also is a professor at the University of Southern California. He offers erudite interpretations of time-honored authors of English literature from William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Brontës to 20th-century and 21st-century writers, including Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison, Edward P. Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said.
Literary scholars and students will find much to digest, particularly in the way Nguyen threads the idea of “the other” as both a literary trope and a lens from which to interpret the world.
As a refugee himself, Nguyen — who was born in Vietnam — has been outspoken in his solidarity with other marginalized communities that have been subjected to war and institutional violence.
By writing through the lens of “the other,” he continues to make the case for a more “expansive solidarity,” particularly in the case of Palestinians.
“Through self-defense, we seek inclusion into a larger community that has excluded us, such as a nation,” Nguyen writes. “But if we succeed in gaining entry, we may forget who still remains excluded as an other, and whether we, the included, now participate and profit from the mistreatment of others.”
