About

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor whose research focuses on critical refugee studies, diasporic Vietnamese literature, postcolonial criticism, theories of food and eating, Asian American studies, world literature, and television studies. His work explores various cultural and literary phenomena through these interdisciplinary lenses, contributing to a deeper understanding of migration, identity, and representation in contemporary contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Computer Science
• History
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Literature
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Conference Friends

  Open Collections · 2024-06-28

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• Staying in Character: Ocean Vuong and the Usefulness of Refugee Beauty

  Modern fiction studies · 2024-12-01 · 3 citations

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  Abstract: This essay argues that Ocean Vuong foregrounds character over identity in his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous —not only to voice the unevenness created by US imperialism, racial violence, and refugee selection, but also to refashion the marginal positioning that refugees are accorded in conventional representations—through his relentless attention to beauty. Although "usefulness" is not a concept usually paired with beauty, Vuong's elegant transformation of the enduring trials of refugee life can be read as a pragmatic and calculated intervention into the aesthetic structures and readerly desires under which refugee stories are usually consumed.

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• Displaced Subjects and Refugee Literature, 1965–1996

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  This chapter reads and surveys Vietnamese American literature as a creative refugee endeavor that was carefully tailored to meet the material needs and pressures of refugee life during the period 1965-1996. This era was a challenging period during which, despite close to 100 English-language volumes written by Vietnamese/Vietnamese American authors, finding a readership interested in the stories that refugees wanted to tell required multiple strategies of textual emergence. These challenges produced a bifurcation of public and private narratives and created a split between simple pedagogical stories that responded to the pragmatic demand to explain oneself and more complex stories that attended to the needs of the burgeoning community and the migrant psyche. With the Vietnam War looming large over their creations and the ways that these literary works are read, this era of Vietnamese American literature could be characterized as a series of attempts to rewrite and remap racial and cultural expectations of refugees, while laying the groundwork for greater forms of self and communal expression.

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• 11. Picturing the Past

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

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  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Art
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• Food in Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature · 2019-03-26

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  Abstract The study of food in Asian American literary and cultural studies is particularly concerned with the political significance of rhetorically linking of identity and cuisine. Addressing the ways eating, cooking, and preparing food is represented in a number of literary works and cultural texts, these academic studies investigate how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression. Indeed, Asian American studies scholars approach food by taking culinary taste, ethnicity, and racialized labor as co-constitutive, rather than given. For the ways Asian American chefs, cooks, eaters, and food workers engage food, in part, defines their cultural position, both internally and to the US population at large. The performative force of these acts is transformed by writers and artists into personal and sensual histories, that for various gendered, linguistic, and economic reasons would otherwise be silenced. Further, Asian American authors and artists can strategically use an interest in food and cuisine to convey the complexity, multiplicity, and history of Asian American identities and politics. Recently the study of food has been transformed into a critical practice used to combat the challenges Asian Americans endure surrounding the question of authenticity. Stories of culinary ethnic affiliation are marketable, and Frank Chin’s calls of “food pornography” loom whenever a predominately white audience wolfs down overly saccharine stories of Asian American culinary solidarity. But in the same breath the genre is also commercially viable because of its unique ability to communicate culturally specific stories in ways that are appealing to younger generations unfamiliar with, or who want to learn more about, customs, traditions, and historical events. Indeed, these stories are unique insofar as they can provide material histories that explain how socioeconomic institutions reproduce racial inequity; yet remain palatable for those outside the ethnic group, even if these readers are those whose subject position comes under review. This article will serve as a reminder, then, that culinary writing remains a robust literary form that makes use of its market appeal to write about Asian America in a manner that is at once personal, material, and historically potent, while the study of this work recognizes that the rhetoric that becomes attached to culinary acts is a unique, active, and, at times, combative, discursive space. The study of food in Asian American studies has been invested in demonstrating how the rhetorical linking of identity and cuisine is a politically significant act. As the “event of eating” is impossible to describe without using expressive language that catalogues communal values, the ways cultural producers write about cuisine is a unit of analysis that can be compared across national traditions, genres, and media. By historically situating how eating, cooking, and preparing food is represented in a number of literary works, academic studies of Asian Americans, food, and literary culture show how culinary and literary tastes serve as boundaries that define and manage racial expression. The ways Asian American chefs, cooks, eaters, and food workers engage food, in part, defines their cultural position, both internally and to the US population at large. The material force of these performative acts has been refashioned, aesthetically, by writers and artists to counter the persistence of the perpetual foreigner stereotype, as Asian American authors and artists leverage a general interest in their food and cuisine to convey the complexity, multiplicity, and history of Asian American identities and politics. Asian American studies scholars approach food by taking culinary taste, ethnicity, and racialized labor as co-constitutive, rather than given. This approach recognizes a unique and active Asian American culinary space, while opposing pernicious stereotypes that seek to limit the power of alimentary images and Asian American ways of life. In this light, the study of food has been transformed into a critical practice used to combat the challenges Asian Americans endure surrounding the question of authenticity. Faced with articulating the parameters of their community, often without the benefit of institutional power, Asian Americans have turned to food to tell not only “who they are” but to communicate sensual and complex histories that for various gendered, linguistic, and economic reasons would otherwise be silenced.

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• Diasporic still life: <i>Midnight at the Dragon Café</i> and the cultural politics of stasis

  The Journal of Commonwealth Literature · 2019-12-17 · 2 citations

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  This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around Chinese Canadian waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations. In the book, sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, which, I argue, creates a scene of stasis — where diasporic subjects work to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes. Bates’s book is remarkable insofar as it maps the unevenness brought on by diasporic globality but in a very "fastened" way — showing how the characters’ global outlooks are shrunk and slowly withered away by the small-town space. This article considers, then, what writing about diasporic stasis achieves in an age that is often characterized by global mobility.

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• All the Promise in the World: Mobilizing Comparison in <i>The Book of Salt</i>

  Canadian Review of American Studies · 2018-06-27

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  The central premise of this article is that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature shifts the temporal and spatial sites, as well as the reading practices, involved in thinking about Vietnamese American literature and subjectivity away from the effects of the so-called Vietnam War and toward a long historical view that compares how Vietnamese actors have accrued, and continue to accrue, worth within differing regimes of global value. With The Book of Salt inching toward canonical status in the Asian American Studies curriculum, it is clear that Monique Truong's work has emerged as a central text of Vietnamese American literature. However, analyzing the novel solely as a work of Asian American literature may, in fact, limit the promise the book holds due to the conventional marketing and reading practices that frequently reduce a heterogeneous collection of Vietnamese American works to a hermeneutic centred around the “Vietnam War.” In contrast, I propose that reading The Book of Salt as a work of world literature reveals how Truong creates a ground of comparison that reimagines accepted routes of cross-cultural representation, reception, and value. This world literature perspective nudges Vietnamese American writing away from its own shores by delving deep into the history of Vietnamese mobility and reconsiders the multiple promises held within the Vietnamese diasporic past in a way that brings into question a singular construction of the Vietnamese present.

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• Introduction—Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination

  Canadian Review of American Studies · 2018-06-27

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• Introduction—Le Vietnam, la guerre et l'imaginaire mondial

  Canadian Review of American Studies · 2018-06-27

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• Spies Like Us: A Professor Undercover in the Literary Marketplace

  LIT Literature Interpretation Theory · 2018-01-02 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Vinh Nguyen

  2 shared

• Evyn Lê Espiritu

  2 shared

• Isabelle Thuy Pelaud

  San Francisco State University

  1 shared

• Elisabeth de Pablo

  Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

  1 shared

• Khanh Nguyen Cong

  Hanoi National University of Education

  1 shared

• Michele Janette

  1 shared

• Laura Mareglia

  1 shared

• Clément Baloup

  1 shared