An analysis of happiness and resilience in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to pronounce knife.

Casco-Solís, Sara

Publication:
An analysis of happiness and resilience in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to pronounce knife.

dc.contributor.author	Casco-Solís, Sara
dc.contributor.department	Sin departamento asociado	es
dc.date.accessioned	2026-02-25T09:29:49Z
dc.date.available	2026-02-25T09:29:49Z
dc.date.issued	2025
dc.description.abstract	This article examines the literary representation of the complexities of the refugee experience in five short stories from Souvankham Thammavongsa’s collection How to pronounce knife. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s (2010) notion of happiness, it investigates how the stories expose the harmful effects of neoliberal scripts on refugees’ wellbeing and interpersonal relations. Moreover, it highlights the characters’ refusal to comply with normative expectations that cast refugees primarily through discourses of trauma, pain, or suffering. Instead, Thammavongsa portrays a community of Lao refugees who, by resisting these prescriptive narratives, cultivate affective bonds of care and solidarity. I argue that such practices emerge as forms of relational resilience that challenge erasure and invisibility, offering alternative ways of imagining refugee life beyond dominant representational frameworks.	en
dc.format	application/pdf
dc.format.extent	17
dc.identifier.citation	Casco-Solís, S. (2025). An analysis of happiness and resilience in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to pronounce knife. International Journal of English Studies, 25(2). https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.660891
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.660891
dc.identifier.eissn	1989-6131 (Internet)
dc.identifier.issn	1578-7044
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10201/213001
dc.language	eng	en
dc.publisher	Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones.	es
dc.relation	The research for this article was supported by the research project “Narrating Resilience: Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology” (PID2020-113190GB-C22), graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.accessRights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/	*
dc.subject	Souvankham Thammavongsa	en
dc.subject	How to pronounce knife	en
dc.subject	Refugees	en
dc.subject	Happiness	en
dc.subject	Resilience	en
dc.subject	Ethics of care	en
dc.subject	Affective bonds	en
dc.subject.ods	No relacionado con ningún objetivo de desarrollo sostenible	es
dc.subject.other	CDU::8- Lingüística y literatura	es
dc.title	An analysis of happiness and resilience in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to pronounce knife.	en
dc.type	info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dspace.entity.type	Publication