Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S. Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume-the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community-present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora. Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors

About the Author :
Linda Ho PechÉ is project director for the Vietnamese in the Diaspora Digital Archive, a digital humanities project by The Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation. Alex-Thai Dinh Vo is a Research Fellow at the U.S.-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon. Tuong Vu is Professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology and Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, and coeditor of The Republic of Vietnam 1955-1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation-Building; Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture; and Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis, among other titles.  

Review :
“Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies makes an important contribution as the first broad-based, edited volume about Vietnamese Americans by primarily Vietnamese American scholars. The many valuable chapters offer a wide range of chronicles of this diasporic community’s history over the past half century. The editors and contributors ‘let Vietnamese Americans tell their own story’-and this book does that, with a largely younger generation of Vietnamese studies scholars who have done careful, meticulous scholarly work.”-Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, and author of The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism “Focused on the social sciences while branching into humanistic fields such as literary and archival studies, Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies makes Vietnamese histories and actors central to any study of ‘Vietnamese America.’ The interdisciplinary essays offer nuanced research and knowledge related to transnationalism, war, and war’s afterlife while linking to broader questions of diasporic histories, politics, and worldmaking. By displacing U.S.-centered frameworks, the volume also questions how critiques of U.S. empire that inform much American studies scholarship can replicate the problems of U.S.-centric thinking.”-Marguerite Nguyen, Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University, and author of America’s Vietnam: The Longue DurÉe of U.S. Literature and Empire "[T]his edited collection forges an interdisciplinary dialogue between historians of modern Vietnam, specifically the Republic of Vietnam, and scholars of Vietnamese American refugees in ethnic studies and Asian American studies. Contributors argue that a deeper engagement with the civic life and culture of postcolonial South Vietnam allows for greater understanding of the formation of Vietnamese American cultural, civic, and political engagement.... Overall, a strong effort to begin connecting Vietnamese studies and Vietnamese American studies.... Summing Up: Recommended."-Choice