‘Other Orientalisms: Refusing to be spectacle’ by Lynda Ng

This week on the ABR Podcast, Lynda Ng reviews To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen, who arrived in the United States from Vietnam as a child refugee in 1975, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. To Save and To Destroy is a collection of pieces Nguyen delivered for the prestigious Norton Lectures. Ng considers Nguyen’s primary subject – the category of otherness – and what ‘it means for such a significant part of the population to be continuously singled out and labelled as “other”’. Lynda Ng is a Lecturer in World Literature (including Australian Literature) at the University of Melbourne. She is the editor of Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria (2018). Here is Lynda Ng with ‘Other Orientalisms: Refusing to be spectacle’, published in the August issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.