Reading Notes: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Identifying with the human and denying one's inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one's own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities."

"...Kundera ... in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The laughter of angels, he says, is the sound of those in power. But should one always be aligned with the angels? Rather than just believe that devils are fallen angels, might it not be the case that angels are triumphant devils?"

"Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of the bombs to those who bombed them?"

"Culture, as Edward Said explains, is inseparable from imperialism, which can be read as humanity being inseparable from inhumanity."