“The Voice in the Picture”: Reversing the Angle in Vietnamese American War Memoirs

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 941-958 ◽  
Author(s):  
HELENA GRICE

Vietnam in the American consciousness is a confluence of images of conflict; where Vietnamese appear they are backdrop to displays of US heroism. There is another story, which Vietnam veteran and filmmaker Oliver Stone calls “the reverse angle, what the war was like from the perspective of the people living in Vietnam.” If America's memory of the conflict is dominated by US perspectives, this is also in images rather than in words. Pictures of monks immolating themselves and people scrambling to board US helicopters have produced a generation who know of Vietnam only through images. One of these images is a bombing mission which dropped napalm on some villagers. AP photographer Nick Ut captured a severely burned Kim Phuc running screaming in the streets; his photo won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most infamous images of conflict ever captured; her recently published life story is the reverse angle and, with similar texts by Le Ly Hayslip, Andrew X. Pham and Duong Van Mai Elliot, represents an emergent perspective, a counternarrative of Vietnam, and a new kind of American literature of peace. My essay explores the inscription of the Vietnamese American perspective on the conflict via life writing.

Author(s):  
Josephine Nock-Hee Park

The first wave of the now-canonical literature of the Vietnam War featured the GI grunt, the wary officer, and the rock-and-roll journalist—all embattled and disillusioned white men. These fictions, memoirs, and reportage came to define the expressive labor shaped by the ethical morass of the war, and these differing genres melded in the cinematic renaissance occasioned by the Vietnam War, which installed a generation of American auteurs. Asian American writers contended with this potent cultural formation, not only to critique the popular imagination of white innocence lost, but to claim the force and even intoxication of this cultural juggernaut. Asian American literary texts from the 1970s onward were shaped by the war and its aftermath—notably including the resistance movements it sparked—and the 21st-century rise of Vietnamese American reckonings with the war’s legacy has instigated significant reappraisals of the aims and effects of the war. The foundational Asian American literary writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin weighed the service of the Asian American soldier in Vietnam in the context of the Third World movements that drove the formation of Asian American studies. A decade later, the publication of bestselling memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, popularly heralded as the emergence of a Vietnamese American voice, marked the origins of a burgeoning field of writing, wide-ranging in form and genre but arrayed alongside and against the mainstream imagination of Vietnam. The major fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) has come to stand as a culminating literary riposte to the canonized first wave of Vietnam War literature: Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel exposes long-standing fictions of U.S. conduct and foregrounds a complex Asian American and refugee perspective. Asian American literature of the Vietnam War expresses a dynamic range of felt responses to the cultural history of the war to produce imaginative work that interrogates the war’s iconic images and reveals its unseen subjects.


DeKaVe ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Akbar Annasher

Broadly speaking, this paper discusses the phenomenon of murals that are now spread in Yogyakarta Special Region, especially the city of Yogyakarta. Mural painting is an art with a media wall that has the elements of communication, so the mural is also referred to as the art of visual communication. Media is a media wall closest to the community, because the distance between the media with the audience is not limited by anything, direct and open, so the mural is often used as media to convey ideas, the idea of ??community, also called the media the voice of the people. Location of mural art in situations of public spatial proved inviting the owners of capital to use such means, in this case is the mural. Manufacturers of various products began racing the race to put on this wall media, as time goes by without realizing the essence of the actual mural art was forced to turn to the commercial essence, the only benefit some parties only, the power of public spaces gradually occupied by the owners of capital, they hopes that the community can view the contents of messages and can obtain information for the products offered. it brings motivation and cognitive and affective simultaneously in the community.Keywords: Mural, Public Space, and Society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.


2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Hague ◽  
John Street ◽  
Heather Savigny

Author(s):  
Mariya Aleksandrovna Akimenkova

The article shows that in career development, the use of acting techniques opens up new opportunities. The author traces the development of the Russian acting school, created by K.S. Stanislavsky and later revised and supplemented by his students, in the modern socio-economic situation. The article demonstrates that despite the fact that for many years this school was aimed exclusively at educating and training people who want to connect their lives with the theater, it had a significant impact on amateurs as well. Passion for the performing arts was traced among people of a wide variety of professions, which contributed to the creation of numerous amateur theaters. This tendency was especially evident in educational institutions. Pupils and students under the guidance of an experienced director tried to take steps in the stage space, received grateful responses, but continued to be content with the role of an amateur actor, without encroaching on the laurels of a professional. Nevertheless, after that, their main activity, regardless of the direction, moved to a completely different level. Without any psychotherapeutic interventions, the attitude to oneself, to the people around, and to situations changed, the speech apparatus and the timbre of the voice were transformed, phobias and depressive tendencies disappeared. As a result, participants in amateur theaters acquired a new circle of friends and promotions, or they radically changed their field of activity, opening completely new prospects for themselves. The article examines these possibilities in the framework of the modern situation, when the entire range of theater and acting means may be in demand by representatives of other professions.


2010 ◽  
Vol 196 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Stein

Like any prophet, Ezekiel hears the voice of God and it is his prophetic task to relay God's message onto the people. He hears the voice of God more often (93 times) than any other prophet, and the way God addresses him as ‘son of man’ or ‘mortal’ is also unique. Ezekiel experiences a variety of other auditory phenomena, including command hallucinations which are not described in any other prophet, 3:3 ‘He said to me; mortal eat this scroll that I give to you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.’


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suspicion Mudzanire ◽  
Collium Banda

Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa justified his unconstitutional ascendency to power after a military coup that dethroned former President Robert Mugabe in 2017 by claiming that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’. He repeated the claim in 2018 when Nelson Chamisa refused to recognise him as the legitimately elected president of the country after accusing him of rigging the 2018 elections. Mnangagwa’s use of God’s name to authenticate his rule raises the question: as one of the foundational attributes of God is justice, what does it mean for political leaders openly claiming to be ordained into office by him? This leads to a further question: Has Mnangagwa’s rule satisfied the demands that come with claiming to be ordained by God to rule, and what should be the church’s response towards Mnangagwa’s rule in view of God’s justice? This article uses God’s attribute of justice to critically evaluate Mnangagwa’s claim that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’. The claim is described and placed within Mnangagwa’s claims and insinuations to be a Christian. His current rule, which is characterised by violent repression and corruption is examined and evaluated. God’s attribute of justice is presented and highlighted in how it challenges Mnangagwa to reform his rule to align it with God’s nature of justice.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article combines insights from religion and politics, the mission of the church in a context of political oppression and systematic theology to highlight the need for the Zimbabwean churches to judge all political systems according to the adherence to God’s justice. It also provides some theological tools by which churches can protect themselves from being co-opted by unjust and oppressive regimes that violate God’s justice.


Author(s):  
Francisco Felizol Marques ◽  

In democracy, the people take the place of a single and universal God. Since the first democracy’s modern theorizations there is a tendency to give the people the (not) attributes of a single god. This abstraction of features allows the people to include all the differences and particularities and then universalizes itself as the source and foundation of all power. The people in democracy are not only innate, uncaused, immortal, incorporeal, unextended, are omnipresent, omniscient (or infallible) and omnipotent - negative attributes as well. The people have also virtues that have been established as human, which, because sacralized, sublimated, are negative attributes as well. The only positive feature of the people, to be full age, reveals its functional nature. The voice of the people is the voice of a God. Therefore the single God creates over his voice, the people creates in an election result. In democracy, this voice creates in an infallible way.


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