Vietnamese American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Janette
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Direct Analysis ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Displaced Populations ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Refugee Experience

While the Vietnam War looms large in American national culture of the 20th century, Vietnam, Vietnamese people, and Vietnamese American experiences have been little attended to. Vietnamese American literature engages this erasure both in writing about Vietnamese perspectives on that war and by expanding the signification of “Vietnam” beyond being a synonym for a war. Beginning in the 1960s, Vietnamese American literature in English was dominated for the next few decades by memoirs, largely designed to educate American readers about Vietnamese politics and history. Rather than continuing to offer Vietnam as it appears in much other American literature, as a surreal backdrop to a US psychic wound, these writers narrate Vietnam, Vietnamese people, and Vietnamese Americans with autonomous geographical, philosophical, emotional, and intellectual presence and perspective, and often provide direct analysis and critique of both the South Vietnamese regime and its American ally. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Vietnamese American literature has diversified in both form and content, expanding the field beyond direct engagement with the Vietnam War and the refugee experience, in work that rewrites canonical Western characters and genres, that challenges normative literary forms as well as social identities, and that explores US racialization, consumerism, and popular culture. In addition to writing Vietnam and Vietnamese American experiences into the national American imaginary landscape, this literature reconfigures the demonized and threatening tropes of the threatening, untrustworthy “gook,” and the passive, dependent “victim” figure, into the socially necessary and beneficial “critical refugee.” Through the experiences of marginalization, trauma, and survival, the critical refugee possesses insights and knowledge necessary for a 21st century of increasing displaced populations, whether from war, famine, or natural disaster. This critical perspective is also more transnational than nationalistic or exilic, exploring both physical and imaginary transnational connections.

The Vietnam War and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Dynamic Range ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Third World

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.

scholarly journals Dirty tricks on the underground press

1981 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Rips
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
Underground Press ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Us ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

What was known in the United States as the ‘underground press’ – self-published newspapers of the youth counterculture sold at street corners and around campuses in American cities during the 1960s and early 70 s – was once a significant network estimated at over 400 publications. Their hallmark was opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War, criticism of the authorities, of uncontrolled technology and big business, advocacy of sexual freedom and artistic experimentation and, frequently, the advocacy of marijuana, LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Few of these publications have survived the past ten years, and their disappearance has been variously attributed to the cooling of radical interest after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as well as to the vague and shifting nature of the ‘hippie’ scene. Complaints by their publishers during the early and mid-seventies that printers refused their business, that office rents suddenly doubled, that advertising was cancelled, that papers were lost – these were seen as local accidents and were rarely reported by the established media. Claims of official or officially-sanctioned harassment were dismissed – even by fellow radicals – as paranoid. Recent research by Geoffrey Rips of the PEN American Center has revealed the extent and variety of official pressure exerted against alternative publications during the Vietnam War period. Using evidence from government hearings like the Church Committee, which reported in 1976, actual FBI documents released to American PEN under the Freedom of Information Act, and other sources, Mr Rips argues that such harassment contributed materially to the closure of certain publications and in general terms constituted a gross infringement on the protection afforded to dissenting opinion and to a free press under the US constitution. We publish edited extracts here from Geoffrey Rips' report which will be published in full by the PEN American Center and the City Lights Press.

scholarly journals The Voice of the Lord from a Record Player (Vietnamese Highlands, 1960s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Gábor Vargyas
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The World ◽  
Record Player ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Voice

In this paper, I present a short excerpt from an 18-hour-long Bru life history recorded in 1989 in the Central Vietnamese Highlands among the Bru/Vân Kiều of Quảng Trị. The excerpt sheds light on the circumstances of Christian evangelization among the Bru through the recollections of a Bru man who was not Christian himself but was in contact with the key protagonists of the events, the missionaries and the evangelized Bru people. The interview reveals on how the evangelized and non-evangelized viewed the evangelists. What were the ways of promoting evangelization? Were the Bru impressed by the world of the evangelizers? How did the Bru conceive of the evangelizers? How convincing did they find their arguments? Beside its immanent value, this intercultural encounter has a significance beyond itself insofar as it is situated in and reflective of the icy political and ideological milieu of the Vietnam War in the 1960s–1970s, the impacts of which were still lingering when the recording was made.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
American Business ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Political Landscapes ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter explores the transformed religious, economic, and political landscapes in Europe and the United States at the time of Graham’s return to Berlin and London in 1966. It explains why Graham was now facing sharper criticism: the theological climate had shifted even further away from Graham’s rather fundamentalist theology, which now appeared outdated. The 1960s counterculture articulated an increasing consumer critique that zoomed in on Graham’s unconditional support for American business culture and the American way of life. And the Vietnam War, from which Graham never really distanced himself, loomed large over his revival meetings, where he now faced open political protest. But even more so, the increasing secularization of crusade cities such as London and Berlin made it significantly harder to rally support for Graham’s revival work at the same time when Graham’s highly professionalized revivalism was increasingly perceived as secular and formulaic.

The Vietnam War in American Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Calloway
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
War Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Vietnam War Literature ◽  
The Vietnam War

Vietnam War literature is a prolific canon of literature that consists primarily of works by American authors, but it is global in scope in its inclusion of texts from writers of other nationalities like Australia, France, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The war’s literature first emerged in the 1950s during the Cold War when Americans were serving as advisors to the French and the Vietnamese in literary works such as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a British novel, and William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American, an American novel, and gradually evolved as American involvement in the war escalated. In the mid-1960s, Bernard B. Fall, who grew up in France and later moved to the United States, offered well-known nonfiction accounts like Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina and Hell in a Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, and numerous other writers, mostly Americans, began to contribute their individual accounts of the war. Thousands of literary works touch on the Vietnam conflict in some way, whether in the form of combat novels, personal narratives and eyewitness accounts, plays, poems, and letters, and by both male and female writers and authors of different ethnicities. These numerous literary works reflect the traits unique to this war as well as conditions endemic to all wars. Many Vietnam War texts share the cultural necessity to bear witness and to tell their writers’ diverse war stories, including accounts from those who served in combat to those who served in the rear to those who served in other roles such as the medical profession, clerical work, and the entertainment industry. Important, too, are the stories of those who were affected by the war on the home front and those of the Vietnamese people, many of whom were forced to leave their homeland and resettle elsewhere after the war during the Vietnamese diaspora. While combat novels are still being written about the Vietnam War decades later, notably Denis Johnson’s award-winning Tree of Smoke and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, bicultural studies that reflect work by North Vietnamese writers and the Viet Kieu are especially pertinent because Vietnam War literature is a continuing influence on the literature emerging from the 21st-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Fuck Him, He Wasn’t With Us”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bussel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Urban Revitalization ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Direct Involvement ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the convergence of events that thrust Harold Gibbons into the maelstrom of national politics and led to his estrangement from the Teamsters's hierarchy. It first considers how Gibbons's rifts with Teamsters played out among Local 688's membership in St. Louis, which helped oust Gibbons in the summer of 1973, terminated his political partnership with Ernest Calloway, and signaled the demise of their quest for total person unionism and working-class citizenship. It then discusses Calloway's gradual withdrawal from direct involvement in civil rights activism and union affairs by the end of the 1960s, assuming instead the role of respected community elder. It also describes Gibbons's opposition to the Vietnam War and his difficulty in finding outlets for political expression during the last years of his career, even as he continued with his advocacy of interracial politics and comprehensive strategies for urban revitalization. Finally, it reflects on Calloway's death on December 31, 1989.

Sino-American Relations and the Vietnam War, 1964–66

1976 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank E. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
International Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Public Signals ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S

Perceptions as well as realities have always played an important role in international politics and it is frequently difficult to separate the two. By the 1960s the realities of increased American involvement in South east Asia and a more militarily and politically influential China heightened the possibility of a Sino-American confrontation. It is the thesis of this study that the United States and the People's Republic of China, both fearful of that possibility as a spill-over from the conflict in Indochina, reached a tacit understanding limiting their involvement. This understanding was transmitted through a series of subtle public signals and, quite possibly, by a number of confidential communications. The primary motive was to prevent an unwanted Sino-American con frontation which could have resulted from a misperception of intentions. As will be demonstrated in this study both Peking and Washington sought, on a number of occasions, to transmit their intentions in order to prevent misperceptions and possible over-reactions.

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