This annotation was written in reference to my paper: “Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt: Unsanctioned (Hi)stories of Love Caught in the Circuits of Global Capitalism.” See my abstract here.
Eng, David L. “The End(s) of Race.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 123 (2008): 1479-93. Print.
In this article David L. Eng asserts that Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt draws “insistent attention to who and what must be forgotten so that the high modernism exemplified by Stein and Toklas might come to be affirmed” (1481). He notes that in order for this iconic lesbian couple to be inscribed in history as “Modernist” and to uphold the historical coherence of this putatively progressive era, the histories of exploitation and oppression of other queer migrants must be systematically disavowed and “forgotten.” As a result, Binh’s love—the intolerance he faces and the ultimate failure of his queer romances—needs to be relegated to an unsanctioned time and space as a history that can only be told as fiction.
I argue, however, this should not be viewed as entirely negative because Truong’s novel reveals the power of fiction to recover unrecorded, repressed (hi)stories of love to fill in the gaps of official narratives. While Eng explores how The Book of Salt offers a critique of Euro-American archival accounts of history, I want to extend his argument by considering how the historical erasure and ultimate failure of Binh’s queer romances can be attributed to the mechanics of global capitalism.
Sharon Tran 