Writing the Non-Place: On Transcultural Memory and Migration✍️

Accent welcomes Terry Nguyen @nguyenterry to teach students how to bring setting into their writing and to contend with the changing role of place in our lives as globalization unsettles the landscapes that we grow attached to. This class has both a critical and creative component, drawing on the writings of Édouard Glissant, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hoa Nguyen, and others to build a framework that helps students generate writing in real time.

Terry Nguyen’s writing in insightful, moving, and charismatic, tracing patterns in media to reveal broader currents in art and culture. Her close engagement with contemporary critical conversations deepens her work, enabling her to grapple with complex modern phenomena with clarity and grounded insight.

This workshop will investigate how notions of place and belonging surface in students’ writing, and how our relationships to place and displacement shape how we write. Setting is essential to every kind of writing, and we tend to assume that the stories, poems, or essays we write occupy fixed ground. But as migration and rapid industrialization remake the world, fewer of us (including our fictive or poetic counterparts) exist in stable places. We write from temporary sublets, hotel rooms, coffee shops, and towns that no longer exist in the form we once knew.

The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to describe the transient places we pass through without fully inhabiting, spaces like supermarkets, malls, and transportation hubs, that carry little historical or relational significance. This class borrows Augé’s term and expands upon it: How is our understanding of place—and belonging—impacted by migration, globalization, and the passage of time? Where is our writing located, and how are these sites inhabited, remembered, or imagined? How can the non-place be a generative force?