Notes on Sources [with annotations]
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx [I would like to learn to live finally]
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose [I caught this morning morning’s minion]
E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel [The failure to make connections is complicity. Reform is complicity. It is complicity in the system to be appalled with the moral structure of the system.]
James Joyce, Ulysses [H-E-L-Y-S [What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?]]
V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival [raw nerves]
W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn
Teju Cole, Open City
HLA Hart, The Concept of Law
William Wordsworth, The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth [While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/We see into the life of things.]
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains [Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time [‘Shamindan, yesterday, sitting in his room and listening to a classic song’, ‘Samad, a couple of weeks ago, listening to slow music]
Graham Greene, The Quiet American [the old women burst into their twitter of the hedges which I could understand no more than the gossip of the birds]
Gerald Murnane, The Plains [Each place is more than one place.]
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, or The Inspection House
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
I Ching, or Book of Changes (translated by Richard Wilhelm)
Edward Said, Orientalism
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury [honeysuckle]
Alice Munro, Runaway [the crooked stems of the frangipani tree]
Truong Buu Lam, Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931 [How beautiful are the rubber trees!]
Christopher Goscha, The Modern History of Vietnam
Trần Đức Thảo, Phénomenologie et materialisme dialectique [translation by Daniel J Herman and Donald V Morano; ‘On Indochina’, translated by Hayden Kee; Shawn McHale, ‘Tran Duc Thao, 1946-1993: Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory’]
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me [Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? (Bellow)]
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis’ [a book no longer discussed today]
Ho Chi Minh, Walden Bello presents Ho Chi Minh: Down with Colonialism!
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than being [Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others [Alain Toumayan, ‘“I more than the others”: Dostoevsky and Levinas’ (2004) Yale French Studies 104]]]
Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida
Huỳnh Sanh Thông, An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems: From the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries [Since then, inside me, summer has blazed up]
JM Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K [How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?]
Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kiều (translated by Huỳnh Sanh Thông) [play of ebb and flow]
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Aimé Césaire, Cahier D’un Retour au Pays Natal [Va t’en…]
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross [Ines and Eyal Weizman, celltexts.org]
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities [Ernst Renan, ‘Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’]
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Augustine, Confessions [Jacques Rousseau, Confessions]
Anne Carson, ‘Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela’
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia [Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.]
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Franz Kafka, The Trial [Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’]
Ngô Vĩnh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French [epic poem [All through the sixty years of French colonisation our people have always been hungry. They were not hungry to the degree that they had to starve in such numbers that their corpses were thrown up in piles as they are now. But they have always been hungry, so hungry that their bodies were scrawny and stunted; so hungry that no sooner had they finished with one meal then they started worrying about the next; and so hungry that the whole population had not a moment of free time to think of anything besides the problem of survival.[Nghiem Xuan Yem, ‘Nan Dan Doi’ (The Starvation Crisis of the People), Thanh Nghi]]]
Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kiều, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông [A hundred years – in this life span on earth/talent and destiny are apt to feud./You must go through a play of ebb and flow/and watch such things as make you sick at heart./Is it so strange that losses balance gains? [Who gets this loses that] [Shen Hsien Chuan (Stories of Gods and Fairies) [Every thirty years, the vast sea turns into mulberry fields, and mulberry fields turn into the vast sea]]
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities [Recalled to life!]
Mandaley Perkins, Hanoi, Adieu
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Thạch Lam, Hà Nội băm sáu phố phường [It was said that on cloudy afternoons, in every little hamlet across the country – from the river deltas to the mountain jungles – the people sat in their courtyards looking up at the sky in the hope of catching a blurry reflection of the old capital in the clouds.]
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [Margaret Miles, ‘Volo ut sis: Arendt and Augustine’ Dialog: A Journal of Theology]
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Wilson [In pain I am a match for any man [Whom do you know most saddled down with sorrow?/They are the ones I’d equal, grief for grief] trans. Fagles]]]
Wallace Stevens, ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’
William Faulkner, The Light in August
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain [Remarkable…for how beautifully it achieves its daring project of making the Vietnamese real. [George Packer, The New York Times Book Review]]
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse [the stars were shining [magnetized fingers [Marcel Proust, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu]]]
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [totalitarian love]
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself [If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout and God-fearing parents, together with the favour of God’s grace, would have been enough to make me good.]
Jean Anouilh, Antigone [Antigone: Just out for a walk. It was all grey. Beautiful. But now everything’s turned pink and yellow and green. Like a postcard. You’ll have to get up earlier, Nan, if you want to see a world without colours…The garden was still asleep. I caught it unawares. A garden that hasn’t yet begun to think about people. Beautiful.]
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street
Alexis Wright, The Swan Book [What happens when a swan enters the big stories of brolga country? [‘A Journey in Writing Place’, Meanjin]]
Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Passion, Betrayal and Revolution in Colonial Vietnam: The Memoirs of Bao Luong
The Vietnam War: A Documentary Reader ed. Edward Miller [We the undersigned, representing a group of eminent citizens and personalities, intellectuals of all tendencies, and men of good will, recognize in the face of the gravity of the present political situation that we can no longer remain indifferent to the realities of life in our country. [The Caravelle Manifesto]]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus [The limits of my language mean the limits of my world]
Virginia Woolf, The Waves [said Bernard; said Susan; said Rhoda; said Neville; said Jinny; said Louis]
Edward V Vacek, ‘Scheler’s Phenomenology of Love’, The Journal of Religion
David Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power [Countrymen, can you hear me clearly? … Clearly![Vietnam: State, War and Revolution (1945-1946)]]
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ [Representation has not withered away.]
Lady Borton, Sensing the Enemy: An American woman among the boat people of Vietnam [The camp was blueness, blue plastic, blue-striped plastic; blue-checked plastic; houses made from blue plastic stretched over lashed jungle saplings; palm trees with blue plastic, cardboard and gunnysack houses clinging to them.]
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies [But this forgetting also begets remembering (sometimes thought of as haunting).]
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia [The real martyrs prefer to suffer [Peter Benenson, ‘First Notes on Organisation]]
Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, The General Retires and Other Stories
Jinghua Qian, ‘Things and their makers: from “European labour only” to “ethical consumerism”’, Right Now [About 250 metres from my Footscray flat and my “European Labour Only” desk is a cafe called The Dancing Dog.]
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: & Other Literary & Cultural Essays [There is perfection and perfection. [Eugene TeSelle, ‘Looking for Home: Travel as Metaphor in Augustine’ Annali d'Italianistica, Vol. 14, L'Odeporica / Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature (1996)]]
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’]
Dori Laub, ‘Bearing witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening’ [A flood of awe and fear]
Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter’ [a letter always arrives at its destination]
Stephen B. Young, ‘The Orthodox Chinese Confucian Social Paradigm’ in Confucianism and the family [When his or her fate is auspicious, a Vietnamese is said to possess phuc duc or ‘merit-virtue.’]
Yifat Hachamovitch, ‘The ideal object of transmission: An essay on the faith which attaches to instruments (de fide instrumentorum)’, Law and Critique [the again and again of a failure]
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Karl Marx, Capital
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Geoffrey C. Gunn, Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power
Jean Chesneaux, The Vietnamese Nation: Contribution to a History
Hữu Ngọc, Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture