Literally Displaced
Writing the Southeast Asian Diaspora
An exhibit on Southeast Asian American Writers
Literally Displaced: Writing the Southeast Asian Diaspora centers the voices, memories, experiences, and desires of writers from the Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese diaspora. Exploring their selected published works alongside materials from the University of California, Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive, this exhibit asks how literature illuminates the conditions of displacement for Southeast Asian Americans and what new understanding emerges when we write from the position of the displaced. Through these writers' masterful storytelling and representations, we are invited to delve deep into themes such as the role of language in refugee families, vexed identity formations, familial connections, negotiating cultural memory, and more. This digital exhibit accompanies the physical exhibit running in the Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center on March 1-April 30, 2022 and is a partnership between the UCI Libraries OC&SEAA Center, the Humanities Center, and Illuminations: the Chancellor's Art & Culture Initiative at the University of California, Irvine.
We have compiled a number of other Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American Writers: