The end of the American Century exposes many of its cultural beneficiaries and products to fresh scrutiny. In the first of a series of conversations with contemporary writers, which examine literature as a sign of the times, Pankaj Mishra speaks to Viet Thanh Nguyen about what it means to be an American writer as Pax Americana comes to an end.

Nguyen arrived in the United States as a refugee from a war the country preferred to forget, whose devastating impact he explored in a novel, The Sympathizer and a collection of essays, Nothing Ever Dies. Few novelists have thought harder about the Faustian bargains of American literary prestige, whose laurels can be withdrawn instantly from anyone who speaks too loudly about the bloody business of empire.

For decades, American Literature remained reticent about the brutal workings of imperial power abroad. The livestreamed genocide in Gaza, accomplished with bipartisan political support, has made it harder to maintain the gap between reality and literary fiction. Already, words that could not be uttered within mainstream literary institutions can be heard there, and writers of a younger generation are beginning to connect what happens abroad with what happens at home. Mishra and Nguyen consider what a literature that refused the world as it has been narrated to us might look like, and whether the end of the American era could be where it begins.

Pankaj Mishra: What does it feel like to be described as an American writer in a post-American world? When you and I started out thinking about writing, America was the hegemonic power – not just politically, economically or militarily, but culturally, spiritually. The catastrophic loss of American cultural capital and moral prestige is the most extraordinary event of our times. What is it like to be a writer from the US now?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I came of age in the US after 1975, when my family arrived as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War, during an interregnum in American power. The US had been checked very heavily by its defeat in Vietnam, and by the time I got to university it was trying to reclaim that power. The period from 1975 to [Desert Storm in] 1991 was a moment of quietude in the American empire as it regathered itself.

At that point I considered myself an Asian American writer, or a minority writer, and that identity fit perfectly within American multiculturalism. After 1991 and 2001 it became clear to me that multiculturalism and diversity were insufficient languages to describe systems of inequity and power. 9/11 ushered in the moment we’re still living in: the complete visibility of violence in American society – at home, as there always has been, but also an attempt to reclaim power on the international stage.

For long, I fought not to be introduced in the US as a Vietnamese American writer – a writer with adjectives in front of his name. It was always a pleasure to go abroad and be introduced as an American writer. It allows me to talk about myself as an American who is American because he was a refugee from an American war, and as an American who needs to take responsibility for what the US is doing. Even if I am deeply opposed to what it is doing, I am still implicated in it.

That’s the obligation, or choice, offered to American writers, including so-called minority writers. We could embrace our minority identity and seek inclusion in the empire through these now-contested ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion. Or we could stress our identities as Americans and embrace that complexity – which means not renouncing our complicity in empire but foregrounding it.

Is there a degree of wilful obliviousness here? You come from a country that was destroyed by the US. Many people who’ve spent their lives in the US have never reckoned with its large footprint on other societies. In your Charles Eliot Norton lectures, you critiqued an earlier generation of writers who wrote about coming to the US, longing to be absorbed, accommodated – and thereby ending up affirming the fairytale the country likes to tell about itself.

Looking from abroad, it can seem that many in the American literary community fail to offer compelling accounts of life in the US. I’m not asking them to offer political critiques or explicit opposition to Donald Trump and his minions. I’m asking of them what they once asked of writers in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China: a real reckoning with an oppressive political and economic system. Is that beginning to happen?

The question of obliviousness is interesting. In the tradition of US black writers, there has always been a consciousness that much of American society – non-black, especially white, but also immigrants and refugees who get to take part in the so-called American dream – participates in it, and promulgates the idea of the US as an exceptional country, through its obliviousness to what has been done to indigenous peoples and to black and enslaved peoples. That charge of obliviousness runs through the work of many black writers: W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King Jr.

But the next step is not only your obliviousness to the domestic structure of racial, class and gender exploitation – it’s your obliviousness to the US as a global power. That has caused problems even for some black writers. Baldwin’s career is fascinating. He leaves the US in the 1940s for Paris. The Fire Next Time is still the book he’s best known for, and people talk about it in the same way they talk about King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, because it still works within a tragic account of American failure and American possibility.

Not many people talk about No Name in the Street, from the early 1970s. By then Baldwin has witnessed the assassinations of King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. There’s a moment in that book where he remembers returning to Paris in the early 1950s and asking: where have all the Arabs and Algerians gone? They had been there earlier; now they were gone, because of the Algerian war. That’s when Baldwin starts to lose his obliviousness about what happens outside the US. By the end of No Name in the Street, he embraces the Black Panthers. The US, he says, is doing to the Panthers what it did to the Vietcong.

The challenge you’re posing requires Americans to connect the two issues, and there’s so much pressure not to. The assumption is that if we’re going to be progressive or liberal, what we’re talking about is domestic issues. That’s why the Gaza genocide blew up the possibility of containment. That was the link that could no longer be denied – or, if people tried to deny it, the denial would eventually fall apart under its own contradictions.

So, three years late, we see a little more willingness by American writers to finally say the word “genocide”. But we’re not seeing what you’re asking for: for these writers to apply their talents not just to saying things at a forum but to actually writing novels or poems – attempting, aesthetically, to deal with these politics, like the dissident writers of China or the Soviet Union. The tradition of dissident writing in the US is too often contained under the rubric of civil rights, not anti-imperialism.

There was a black internationalism that many people in Asia and Africa were intensely aware of. That Nina Simone and James Baldwin engaged with the African experience was widely known when I was growing up in India. When I came to the US in the mid-1990s, I saw how that internationalist tradition had disappeared. People have come very late to these volcanic disasters, in Gaza and elsewhere, and they don’t know the history. The link was broken between the wider anti-imperialist front, where American writers were once present, and the larger struggles of people in Asia and Africa.

Is this due to a certain kind of professionalisation and pressure to maintain sources of income in the American culture industry?

It’s not just the US; it’s also the UK and France. You used the word “professional”. It was Hanif Kureishi who talked about the professional Pakistani, back in 1985. The process is the same. I recognise that I’m offered opportunities to be the professional Vietnamese or the professional Asian American, and I’m not the only one.

After the Second World War, there was a period of radical and nationalist revolution and violent decolonisation. What followed was a counterrevolution: the suppression, by various means, of those triumphant nationalist governments and, in the West, of radical movements like the Black Panthers. By the 1980s, you see the rise of Reagan, and all the radical energies of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s contained through the commodification of protest and identity. That’s true not only for black people but for Asian Americans, in my case. Suddenly you’re offered the opportunity to take the energy of global revolution and decolonisation and turn it into an identity.

But even that kind of corporatised, packaged rebellion is still too threatening, which is why, for the right and the far right in the US and elsewhere, diversity, equity and inclusion have become words of horror. They must be demonised. From my perspective, DEI didn’t go far enough – it [became] a corporate brand. For the far right, it is replacement theory in operation.

Now, partly because of the genocide in Gaza, people are being forced to articulate what they really believe. That happened in the 1950s and 1960s too. It could no longer be only about civil rights. It had to be about recognising that racial and other forms of domestic inequality were inseparable from imperial and colonial violence.

The obsession with civil rights – a correct obsession, but one that obscures a longer tradition of anti-imperialism – is dramatically illustrated in Barack Obama. For many, he was the fulfilment of the 1960s dreams. It turns out he was actually a member of the establishment [and offered] some respectability to an establishment damaged by the war on terror and the financial crisis. He gave liberals a fresh self-image; the American fairy tale was reanimated with new characters. But he paved the way for Trump. He expanded the post-9/11 assault on civil liberties; he ramped up drone assassinations. He personally chose lists of people to be killed. But the literary community’s romance with Obama prevents the reckoning with the facts of American imperialism.

It’s so funny how easily the literary community was seduced by the fact that Obama reads books – or claims to; we have no idea what actually happens – and puts out a list of books every year.

The reader-in-chief.

The reader-in-chief. Many writers are thrilled to appear on his list. What isn’t questioned is that what’s at stake is the maintenance of American global power, which benefits some Americans at home. The real question is how to manage that power. Do we exercise it as hard power, which is what Trump represents – a naked, nineteenth-century imperialism, when no one stopped the US from exercising genocidal violence on the frontier and taking everything it wanted? Or as soft power: the carrot and the stick, drone warfare, but done with a smile and a literary sensibility?

The tropes I use to describe this come from literature: the ugly American and the quiet American. Both are titles of novels. The Ugly American, a book by a couple of American writers called William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, depicts the naked exercise of American power in East Asia in the middle of the century. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, depicts the opposite: a well-intentioned, polished, well-educated but misguided American liberalism that still believes the US is the best country to guide the world. That is what Obama represents. Trump represents the opposite. Both are symptoms of an underlying structure: a struggle over how to manage American power.

The temptation for liberalism – and this is why both Baldwin and King didn’t trust American liberals – is to sacrifice genuine equality as long as the exercise of American power is genteel enough not to threaten their profits. Writers are part of that system. It’s entirely possible to be an American writer of a racialised, minoritised or colonised background and be rewarded for your work, so long as you don’t question what must come first but is never spoken of: the maintenance of American power. What’s spoken of explicitly is how to make America a more just society, which is code for how to fine-tune American power, or imperialism, from the inside, so there’s less disruption at home. No one questions what happens beyond American borders.

There has never been a time when literature has come into such close contact with imperial politics. The only other instance is the UK. But there was a very large distance there between the practices of British imperialism and the creation of literature. Most people were simply not aware of what was going on, and the means of creating that awareness were few: a handful of newspaper correspondents. Someone like Jane Austen could remain oblivious of events in the Caribbean. You cannot make that argument now.

America possesses so much cultural capital that – let’s be blunt – the work of many third-rate American writers is discussed much more than that of a first-rate writer from Zimbabwe or Vietnam. American writers benefit from that. The American liberal elite really do think of themselves as fundamentally good, bringing their goodness to benighted peoples around the world. But unless you consciously try to move outside those circles of complicity, you will not be an interesting writer or thinker.

I agree. Let me bring up this comparison. As far as I understand it, the British knew they had an empire, and they were proud of it.

That’s right.

It was through empire that the British would bring civilisation to the benighted natives. Americans typically don’t believe they have an empire. They certainly wouldn’t use the word. A conversation like ours about American imperial power would not usually happen in the US, even in the New York Times. What would be discussed is democracy. Americans are proud of their democracy, and of its corollary, freedom. Underlying those is capitalism, which is too vulgar to be spoken of, though it comes up every once in a while. But the mask is democracy and freedom. Americans believe they’re exporting these ideas to the rest of the world. The debate is over how: should we force them down people’s throats, or persuade people gently through our benevolence?

What’s depressing, for writers and intellectuals, is how small a price is required to buy them off. If you’re a journalist or a magazine writer, your position may be in danger if you speak out in a certain way – Jeff Bezos will fire you, for example. But a lot of writers hold positions in universities, and some technically cannot be fired, because of tenure. They can write anything they want. They might be punished in various ways – they wouldn’t be competitive for the next prize or the next promotion – but they wouldn’t lose their jobs. We’re talking about marginal changes in visibility and profitability. Yet many – not all, but many – still can’t bring themselves to write about the issues we’ve been discussing.

That’s how power operates in the US. There is no Ministry of Truth whipping writers if they don’t toe the line. It isn’t necessary, because the system has been set up as a method of soft-power persuasion, and many writers are willing to go along with it. I’m rereading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which has a delicious satire of Soviet writers of the 1930s and 1940s who are sucked into a system where, if they toe the line, they’ll get a nice apartment. American readers may read Bulgakov and laugh at the Soviet Union without recognising that we have the same system.

Coming from India, I’ve always found this odd. To be a writer or intellectual there meant being critical of the political establishment and of your nation-state, especially when that state was suppressing some minority. So this complicity strikes me as very strange. I suppose it’s one of the unrecognised disadvantages of belonging to a very rich, powerful country: you aren’t able to develop enough critical or intellectual resources to write about the world in an interesting way, because you’re always within the system, unable to step out of it.

What American writers write about are the dysfunctions of living within an empire, without using the word empire. There are plenty of novels and works of nonfiction about the terrible things that happen within American society: an unjust education system, a prison system unequal in its application of justice, even young urban professionals addicted to cocaine. These dramas reveal that the US is not a perfect society. But each writer looks at a small piece of it and doesn’t connect it to the operations of the US as a whole.

That raises the question of the culture that would enable people to make that step – from developing an awareness to making it manifest in their work. It could happen if the culture industry, the newspapers and periodicals, was also moving in that direction, telling you about the state of America and the world accurately, without propaganda. I see no sign of that. You’re left on your own, seeking alternative voices here and there. Hopefully some of them will find Equator.

I was looking at the front page of the New York Times the other day, not long after Trump had met Xi Jinping and made some friendly noises. That was reason enough for a Times correspondent to appear on video attacking Trump from the right, essentially saying American leadership is in danger and we need to confront China. This business of confronting nations that, from the liberal American perspective, are getting too powerful and coming up with too many technologies of their own without American input – we can see clearly what Trump is doing, but in the places where information and analysis are offered, there is absolutely no change.

What about acknowledging that China has made a huge material difference to the lives of millions of people around the world? In Pakistan, people who couldn’t get electricity through the main grid have embraced cheap Chinese-made solar panels. That’s quite an extraordinary thing, and it’s happened in many other countries. Yet there’s a steady manufacturing of propaganda that doesn’t stop. I sometimes despair as to whether the people who consume this on a daily basis can ever emerge from these exalted self-images.

This is where I do have a problem with the adjective “American” in “American writer”. The word has so much gravity inside the US. Even for writers who are critical of the US, using the term “American writer” introduces an attachment to the very idea of the US that is hard to overcome. So when you bring up something like China, many Americans would say: OK, yes, we have to be afraid of China. And, as you said, why?

This is where any national adjective becomes a problem for a writer. We should be critical not only of our own nation, but of the idea of the nation-state. Everything you said about China is correct. But China also does things within its borders – its proclaimed borders, or its desired borders – that are problematic, and it should be held to account for them.

Vietnam is an example I know well. Vietnam was deservedly a revolutionary icon for the world in the 1960s and 1970s. When I went to El Salvador last year and interviewed revolutionaries from the 1980s, they welcomed me as a Vietnamese: they had been inspired by Ho Chi Minh, and some had gone to Vietnam to see what the revolutionaries were doing. But no one could look at Vietnam today and think it’s a revolutionary society. It’s a nation-state with the independence it deserves. It’s done some of the same things as China to lift people out of poverty, which is great, and I have no problem with a communist party being in charge. But if you’re a journalist who criticises Vietnam – for its environmental policies, say – you’re put in prison. That’s a problem, and Vietnam should be held to account for it.

So the challenge for someone like me is to acknowledge the necessity of revolution and independence, and the horrifying struggles people went through to liberate themselves from colonialism – and then to treat the nation-states that arise as responsible for their own fates, and no longer revolutionary. The French and American revolutions were great in some ways. And then the French and the Americans turned around and enslaved other populations.They should be held to account. What allows writers to do interesting things is not revolutionary romanticism, but acknowledging the successes of revolutions and then imagining what comes after the nation-state.

There’s one nation-state whose supporters feel it is exempt from any kind of critique, and that it has a greater right to exist than any other: Israel. Victims of imperialism are told to take responsibility for their actions and stop blaming the past. But with Israel, everything is justified by what happened to it – the genocide by 7 October, and everything by what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945. What do you make of this exception?

It’s an exception in terms of degree, but not in terms of what it represents. The exception of degree is simply the scale of the violence Israel is enacting on Palestinians; the degree of support from the West, which was until recently unanimous; and the scale of what’s taking place on a very small piece of land.

But if we acknowledge that there are anti-Zionist Jewish people contesting this – a small fraction within Israel, but a larger population in the diaspora – what it represents is a contradiction that isn’t unique to Jewish people and Israelis. It’s the contradiction between people who are fundamentally attached to their victimisation – ‘we were victimised once, so we are victims, and we can do anything we want’, which is also what the US said after 9/11 – and people from the same population who say: ‘we were victimised, and what we should learn from it is never to be a victimiser.’

When I teach 7 October and its aftermath to American students, I stress this. Yes, we should be critical of Israel and of American support for its actions. But for us as Americans, the lesson is that we did the same thing – and that we, even as liberals, or lovers of literature, are benefiting from it. We are living the future Israel wants for itself: the eradication, or total suppression, of the population on which the nation-state is built. All that will remain is a nostalgic remnant of the Palestinians, as indigenous peoples are about 1 per cent of the population of the US. So we shouldn’t think Israel is the only thing to be critical of. The Israeli template is the template of colonisation that already shaped England, France and the US.

India’s Hindu nationalist government is also trying to emulate Israel. They admire the memory culture Israel has built, and want to make the partition of India into a version of the Holocaust: the Hindu majority was viciously attacked in those weeks, women were raped, people were massacred; this is how we should remember it, and we will never allow it to happen again. And the way to ensure that is to build up national strength, invest in the military, and have close defence relationships with Israel.

You’re right, there has to be a broader critique that doesn’t single out Israel, because that’s often the objection posed by Israel’s defenders: why are you focused on this? But it’s also because it’s the one nation-state that offers itself as a template for a very sinister political transformation, and that is now actively supporting far-right movements around the world.

To bring it back to literature: in the West, there’s a huge emphasis on the human. Art should be about the human, about humanity, about what brings us together universally. But your example of India being inspired by Israel points to other things that make us human too – our inhumanity, our desire for power and conquest, our capacity to do evil and then to forget that we did it. Part of what imperial and national power wants is to erase the links that would let people understand that what Israel is doing now is what the US did then.

My current novel, the third in the Sympathizer trilogy, begins in El Salvador in 1984. Why would a trilogy that begins in the Vietnam War go there? Because the moment the US was defeated in Vietnam, it pivoted to Central America, the new front in the Cold War. And when I started to read, I discovered that Israel was in Central America, exporting its model – weapons manufacturing, arms testing, surveillance technology, computers in counterinsurgency, everything tested in Palestine –to El Salvador, and to Guatemala, where the government conducted a genocide against indigenous peoples. That thread runs to the present, with weapons and technology tested on Palestinians and Lebanese and then exported. That’s how this imperial power operates.

There was another instance in the late 1990s or the early 2000s when Shimon Peres went to India and suggested to the then-Hindu nationalist home minister that the way to solve Kashmir was to do what Israel was doing in the West Bank: steadily turn the local population into a minority through large-scale settlement.

Have you suffered any personal consequences for your outspoken views on this subject?

I have, but I don’t like to talk about it very often, because it seems so minor. Think of the people in the West who actually lost their jobs, or of the Palestinians, who have paid a mortal price – Palestinian writers and journalists who have been silenced, figuratively or literally. The price I paid was small, but it still made the national news.

When 7 October happened, I was on tour for a book called A Man of Two Faces. Around mid-October I signed a letter with 750 other writers, demanding an end to the violence in Palestine. Given Israel’s history, what it was going to do was obvious.

I was scheduled to do an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York…

I remember that.

That’s a major venue for American writers. That afternoon, as I was getting ready, the event was cancelled. The 92nd Street Y is an explicitly Jewish institution that I think has always been Zionist, and became explicitly so after 7 October. Other events were cancelled too, and I’m sure I’ve lost invitations I never knew about. It’s a minor example. But it sent a signal to American writers that if you do something as minor as signing a letter calling for a ceasefire, you’ll pay some kind of price. What’s depressing is how few writers are willing to pay even that. It didn’t cost me my job or much money. I still got to write and publish. But even that degree of opprobrium is too much for a lot of writers.

Do you think the pressures might be lessening now?

Things have changed completely. This goes back to Edward Said’s argument in the 1970s and 1980s that Palestinians did not have permission to narrate their own history against a consensus that supported Israel. So much of Said’s work was about realpolitik with the PLO, but also about symbolic and narrative politics. The one benefit of the last three years is that Palestinians and their supporters are starting to win the battle at the symbolic level.

For a year, at least two, after 7 October I could feel the atmosphere in the rooms I was in. I made sure I said the word genocide, but I was nervous about it. At events run by prestigious organisations, younger staff would sometimes be wearing the keffiyeh, and they’d tell me the board didn’t want me to talk about Gaza. But in the last year or so I’ve been at events where people say genocide freely, and no one blinks. People realise there’s very little penalty left for saying that Israel is committing genocide.

The mood has changed even in places like Austria. I was there for an event with the writer Daniel Kehlmann, who lives in Berlin, and the organisers were nervous. One organiser cancelled, and we had to move venues twice. At the final venue, they had their own security and also called in armed police. But the audience was the most sympathetic you could hope for. The previous day, the Austrian president himself had accused Israel of war crimes. He was attacked for it, but you could tell the mood had changed enough for people to come and listen to a conversation about what was going on.

This is the first time I’ve seen a political and intellectual movement achieve a degree of success we hadn’t anticipated. I couldn’t have imagined a day when American politicians would stand up and say: I’m not taking any money from AIPAC.

There’s definitely been a shift in American political discourse, and the centre of the Democratic Party has moved. I don’t think there can be a serious Democratic presidential candidate who isn’t at least critical of Israel. That doesn’t mean they’ll be anti-Israel. And I don’t know what the long-term consequences will be, because there are too many other factors – what the Republicans, Trump and the far right will do, including possibly trying to seize power. But the Democratic Party has been the staunch ally of the Jewish diaspora and its integration with Israel, and now a critical part of that unified front is missing. That’s deeply problematic for Israel, and for the Jewish community it’s a serious moment of decision.

As a writer and an educator, do you find this moment opens up fresh possibilities for younger writers? To open themselves to the literary and philosophical traditions of Asia, Africa or Latin America?

There are positive signs, but I’m going to quote John Berger. He went to Palestine in the early 2000s and, looking at the rubble of what had just happened, described the Palestinian stance as one of “undefeated despair”. That fits my mood. There’s a shift: more political consciousness, more criticism of Israel. But the weight of empire is so strong. Even after 9/11, the multicultural consensus among the literati held. There was attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but mostly to their consequences for Americans. You could still be a happy multicultural writer and get your rewards without seriously contesting the American empire, even if you disagreed with those wars, as just about every writer did.

So how much optimism should we have? I’m sceptical. I’m hopeful that enough writers have seen others take a stance and be inspired, and that enough have been disabused of certain notions about Israel and have started to connect what happens there with what happens in the US. But the implicit fear of losing the profits of empire is there.

The despair, for me, comes from knowing that even what we’ve witnessed in the last few years may not be enough to make more American writers take more radical positions. The undefeated part is that what remains undetermined is how the American empire ends. Does it end in total violence, as the US fights more and more unwinnable wars and spends itself to death? In economic calamity? In the thing we haven’t talked about at all, environmental collapse, which is also part of imperialism and colonialism? Or can the American empire give itself up? The chances of that are very slim. The disintegration of empire will compel writers to write about it, because it will affect their publication possibilities and their profits. I think American writers will respond to empire when the empire collapses. If it can maintain itself, I’m pessimistic about how many will be willing to take it on.

Even the resurrection of the empire’s most unpleasant white supremacist core – erasing African American contributions, even from the military – doesn’t seem to make people grapple with what’s coming to an end.

Take Pete Hegseth cashiering lots of women and black generals and admirals. A lot of American liberals are sad about that, and it is an injustice. But you have to go further. Why were there women and black admirals and generals serving in this military? What does that mean? Why was Colin Powell the one to lead the charge on Iraq? Unless you take that next step, you don’t have a critique of empire. You’re mourning the decline of the empire, because the empire would be better if it had women and black generals and admirals. That drives me crazy.

There’s rich material now for writers of Indian origin: Kash Patel, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy. People are baffled by the sudden emergence of these Indian apparatchiks of the ruling class. I haven’t seen that answered in any fiction – the changing face of empire, in which white supremacy relies on these people to present its power.

Kash Patel is a great example, because I think people are upset that he’s an idiot, but not that he’s Indian. If there were a competent Indian American director of the FBI, a lot of people would say: we don’t totally agree with the FBI, but it’s great to have an Indian American in charge. The problem is that Patel is the embodiment of a certain kind of stupid fascism. What a certain swath of Americans really want is a multicultural authoritarian society. That’s where the conversation needs to go – not simply critiquing a clown, but pointing out that if he were better at his job and a Democrat, people would be much happier.