With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unsettling experiences and sufferings of the Vietnamese (refugees) in his debut short story collection The Refugees (2017). This essay seeks to explore the narratives to outline the patterns of looking dynamics and stratified and interracial gaze operating among the characters. To this end, Lacanian theories of the gaze, the jouissance drive and the mirror stage are employed to examine the subtle nuances and complex mechanisms of looking relations that are instrumental in the development of Vietnamese characters. It is easily noticeable that the growing consciousness among the characters of their prescribed inferior position in the scopic order engenders in them feelings of anxiety and/or conflicting sexual impulses, or the jouissance drive. Nonetheless, the hierarchal gaze is not depicted throughout the collection as an essentialized and fixed phenomenon. Rather, some of the Vietnamese characters succeed to control, recodify and reassert the prevailing structural domination of the looking relations, and hence reclaim their agency and subjectivity in relation to the Other. It is concluded that Nguyen successfully upends the dominant discourses of representations in which the Americans' centrality is eternalized while the Vietnamese' is prescribed and nihilated.

With the recent prevalence of white supremacist discourses in the United States, Asian Americans have unavoidably been subjected to xenophobic gazes and tendencies. The white gaze has traditionally enjoyed the privilege to objectify and fix the diasporic subject both racially and ethnically, foregrounding a relationality that naturalizes the immigrant as the inferior subject. The Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen recounts similar unsettling experiences and sufferings of the Vietnamese (refugees) in his debut short story collection The Refugees (2017). This essay seeks to explore the narratives to outline the patterns of looking dynamics and stratified and interracial gaze operating among the characters. To this end, Lacanian theories of the gaze, the jouissance drive and the mirror stage are employed to examine the subtle nuances and complex mechanisms of looking relations that are instrumental in the development of Vietnamese characters. It is easily noticeable that the growing consciousness among the characters of their prescribed inferior position in the scopic order engenders in them feelings of anxiety and/or conflicting sexual impulses, or the jouissance drive. Nonetheless, the hierarchal gaze is not depicted throughout the collection as an essentialized and fixed phenomenon. Rather, some of the Vietnamese characters succeed to control, recodify and reassert the prevailing structural domination of the looking relations, and hence reclaim their agency and subjectivity in relation to the Other. It is concluded that Nguyen successfully upends the dominant discourses of representations in which the Americans' centrality is eternalized while the Vietnamese' is prescribed and nihilated.

The objective of this chapter is to conduct a sentiment analysis of the Harry Potter novel series written by British author J.K. Rowling. The text of the series is collected from GitHub as an R package provided by Bradley Boehmke. The chapter analyzed the text by R programming to explore dominant sentiments using a lexicon approach of natural language processing (NLP). The results revealed that Professor Slughorn scored the most positive sentiment among the main characters that have heroic qualities; Death Eaters had the most negative sentiment among the anti-hero characters; negative sentiment in the text around the anti-hero characters increased significantly, while the positive sentiment around the hero characters remained constant as the story progressed throughout the series; among the series of novels, The Deathly Hallows contained the most negative sentiment; among all the houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Hufflepuff had the most positive sentiment; and each book of the series appeared negative until the final chapter, which always ended with a positive sentiment.

Contemporary life writings of Iranian diaspora are often censured for promoting a universalizing, dehumanizing and hegemonic image of the nation. The common misgiving is that the narratives project Iranian women as archetypal victims and their male counterparts as essentially powerful subjects. The present study aims at problematizing this assumption by arguing that Ramita Navai's City of Lies (2014) portrays an anti-essentialist character sketch of individuals with diverse identities and complex subjectivities. To pursue this line of argument, this article examines the titular characters' development in the face of the existing tensions between the different psychic and social realities. Lacan's triadic model of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic is used in relation to his notion of the mirror stage to analyze the ways in which the characters traverse between the three orders in the process of forming a sense of selfhood. The notion of selfhood is explored in light of latent desires, anxieties, and the feelings of loss as determining factors behind the psychic development of each character within the prevailing normativities of a heteropatriarchal government. The findings reveal that while Amir, Leyla, Asghar, Bijan, and Farideh find themselves permanently lost in the unconscious tensions between different psychic orders. Dariush, Morteza, and Somayeh break into the Symbolic order and reassert their subjectivity. In this manner, the life writing challenges the grand narratives about Iranians as a homogenous group of people as it offers an equal chance of attaining selfhood and subjectivity to both male and female characters.