Alan Chan

Alan Chan received his Bachelor and Master's degrees from the University of Arizona. Alan is writing his dissertation, "Melancholy Geographies: Figurations of Exile in Linda Lê, Monique Truong, Linh Dinh, and Tran Anh Hung," which reexamines postcolonial identities and aesthetics by putting Vietnamese diasporic works and psychoanalytic formulations of melancholia and interminability in dialog. Collectively, these authors show a desire to work through the griefs of exile and assimilation, yet each deals with the unfinished business of mourning in his or her own fashion, and to a very different effect. It is more productive, Alan argues, to approach a postcolonial/Francophone literature, such as that of Vietnamese living in France and elsewhere, without any presumption of an identity based on a common national origin or shared cultural background. In doing so, postcolonial reading will open up the critical space necessary for the deconstruction of postcolonial thinking itself. When he is not "dissertating," Alan likes to cook, bond with his cats, take pictures, and practice Taekwondo.