The Motley Flow of Student Protests in Dictee and Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Envisioning Asian Diasporic Assemblages

This essay explores how Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982) and Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) envision Asian diasporic assemblages through recounting the tumultuous histories of student protest in East Asia. Led mainly by young students, the scenes of protest—from South Korea's April 19 Revolution in 1960 to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China—signify tenacious movements that correspond to the Asian diaspora's aspirations for an international coalition against global structures of power. Foregrounding transnational student protest narrative as an important genre, this essay seeks to show how North American ethnic literature articulates intergenerational and cross-regional Asian solidarity through multimodal and multilingual form. Arguing that the novels' search for a renewed communal identification is mediated through the affordances of the square form, the essay examines the aesthetics of the square that serves as a conceptual agent and narrative strategy. Through the underlying presence of the first-person plural pronoun in Korean, woori (우리), or in Chinese, wŏmen (我们) and zánmen (咱们), both novelists further expand the radical possibilities of literary multilingualism that resists linguistic power relations and brings forth alternative political vision of “we.” Envisioning the motley flow of resistance through juxtaposing two Asian North American literary texts elucidates the diasporic endeavors to find new language for their community-in-the-making against homogenous national apparatuses and their singularizing silences. © 2023 Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved.