TRAUMA, MIGRATION, AND FRAGMENTED BELONGING: NARRATIVE RUPTURE AND POSTMEMORY IN ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS

The research will discuss the way the book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong reinvents the concept of trauma as a structural and historically determined state and not as a psychological injury on individual levels. Placing the story in the postwar period of the Vietnam War and the dynamics of racial capitalism, the work argues that the circulation of trauma in the novel is mediated by language loss, labor precarity, and intergenerational memory. The text enacted fragmentation as constitutive of migrant subjectivity through its epistolary form and nonlinear temporality. This research will focus on Vuong by reframing narrative rupture as a critical epistemology through the lenses of Cathy Caruth's trauma theory, Marianne Hirsch's concept of post memory, and Paul Gilroy's concept of postcolonial melancholy. The sense of belonging becomes tentative and deferred, revealing the boundaries of assimilationist and therapeutic paradigms in present-day diasporic writing.