The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.
Marian Aguiar is an associate professor of literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research and teaching focus on global cultural studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, border studies, mobilities, and diaspora. She is the author of Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), and coeditor of Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2019). Dr. Aguiar is also coeditor of Palgrave Macmillan's book series Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture. She is currently working on a book on maritime migrant mobilities in the Mediterranean Sea. Email: aguiar@andrew.cmu.edu