Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction

This essay contributes to the postcolonial ecocriticism by examining political allegories in three Vietnamese short stories:“Kiến và người” (The Ants and the Man, 1990), “Mối và người” (The Termite and the Man, 1992), and “Nhện và người” (The Spider and the Man, 2012) by Trần Duy Phiên. This essay reads these stories as literary embodiments of the historical and theoretical need for a postcolonial perspective in ecocriticism. It analyzes the complex relations of humans and nature in the context of national modernization so as to show that postcolonial ecocriticism provides a necessary framework for understanding environmental narratives from Vietnam. Specifically, this essay argues that Vietnamese environmental stories reflect and inflect the political and economic conditions of present-day Vietnam: they consider how modernization and nation-building result in the collapse of nature, the human body, and political ideology. In other words, environmental narratives from Vietnam articulate national allegories, whose analysis calls for a postcolonial approach.