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

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.