Per un’epica delle comparse. In risposta a “Combattere le battaglie dei propri avi” di Antonio Scurati

This response to Antonio Scurati’s essay addresses in particular the section about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015). Nguyen’s novel, Scurati argues, is akin to other post memorial narratives produced by Western authors, which deal with the memory of “the wars of their forefathers.” The article questions Scurati’s view of Nguyen’s depiction of the Vietnam War as a thing of the past, by pointing out how, from the perspective of the Vietnamese diaspora that Nguyen addresses in the novel, the war is in fact still fought in memory.