“I am someone who believes that you do need revolutions when there’s injustice,” Viet Thanh Nguyen told me by phone. “And then the question is, what happens in terms of violence: both the violence of the state and the violence of the revolutionary?”
Nguyen, a professor of English, American studies, and ethnicity at the University of Southern California Dornsife, has been examining questions about violence and revolution from multiple and divided perspectives in both his academic work and his fiction for years. He emigrated from Vietnam as a child with his parents in 1975, and he has become one of America’s sharpest analysts of imperialism in general and of the country’s relationship with Vietnam in particular. His new book, The Committed, is a sequel to his first Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sympathizer, a metaphysical spy novel about colonialism and revolution.
