Flashlight into Ocean Vuong’s "On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous"

This forum grew out of papers presented at the biannual conference of the European Association for American Studies “1924-2024: The American Immigrant Narrative Revisited,” which took place in Munich in April 2024. The number of presentations on Ocean Vuong’s debut novel "On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous" (2019)—six in total—indicated that even after the hype about Vuong’s first prose work had simmered down, scholarly interest in and personal affection for the book is ongoing. Recently listed among "The New York Times’" “100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” "On Earth" is considered one of the most powerful and insightful literary contributions to contemporary Asian American fiction. However, despite the attention that the novel generated, comprehensive scholarship is yet to be produced about it. While the format of the forum cannot, of course, suffice as an in-depth contribution to such scholarship, we hope to at least offer a flashlight-like insight into the novel, and to thereby point toward some of the major literary themes and trends of twenty-first-century immigrant literature. Vuong’s second novel will be published in 2025, and we understand our contributions here as a retrospect, a summary, a “cash check” of what we consider some of the most central aspects of Vuong’s seminal work: war, race, queerness, family, trauma, and writing. While working on this forum it became clear that we are all writing from the position of a scholar, as much as we are writing from the position of a fan: what unites our interest in and our readings of "On Earth" is a sincere admiration for the text, and we hope to speak to those who have already enjoyed Vuong’s work and to spark interest in those who still have it on their “to-read” list.