Four Decades on: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end-including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge-and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries. Contributors. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: National Amnesia, Transnational Memory, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War / Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini 1 1. Legacies Foretold: Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam / Ngo Vinh Long 16 2. Viet Nam and "Vietnam" in American History and Memory / Walter L. Hixson 44 3. "The Mainspring in This Country Has Been Broken": America's Battered Sense of Self and the Emergence of the Vietnam Syndrome / Alexander Bloom 58 4. Cold War in a Vietnamese Community / Heonik Kwon 84 5. The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes / Christina Schwenkel 103 6. Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature / Viet Thanh Nguyen 132 7. Viêt Nam's Growing Pains: Postsocialist Cinema Development and Transnational Politics / Mariam B. Lam 155 8. A Fishy Affair: Vietnamese Seafood and the Confrontation with U.S. Neoliberalism / Scott Laderman 183 9. Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy / Diane Niblack Fox 207 10. Refuge to Refuse: Seeking Balance in the Vietnamese Environmental Imagination / Charles Waugh 242 11. Missing in Action in the Twenty-First Century / H. Bruce Franklin 259 Bibliography 297 About the Contributors 313 Index 315

About the Author :
Scott Laderman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is the author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory, also published by Duke University Press. Edwin A. Martini is Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty and Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000.

Review :
"Four Decades On meets the clear scholarly need for a volume that explores the aftermath of the Vietnam War in Vietnam and the United States. This strong collection of essays demonstrates that the war continued to shape critical dimensions of Vietnamese and American history after 1975 and that these postwar developments must be conceived in a transnational frame." - Mark Philip Bradley,author of Vietnam at War "Four Decades On is a most valuable collection of essays analyzing the legacies of the Second Indochina War from inside Vietnam and the United States and, in some essays, from broader transnational perspectives. Addressing film, literature, politics, memory, Agent Orange, the environment, trade, and reconciliation and its absence, this collection would make an excellent concluding assignment to any course on the Vietnam War." - Marilyn B. Young, coeditor of Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History