Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse

Nguyen, Viet Thanh

doi:10.1353/ncr.2007.0007

Cited by 21 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…As Viet Nguyen observes, Vietnamese Americans as subjects of war are yoked to an ethical memory of the past, haunted by the forgotten and dead, bound to a future without moral salvation and a past without innocence. 21 Given this, Vietnamese Americans do not always possess what Kim Nguyen calls "the luxury of historical amnesia. " 22 For Vietnamese refugees and their foreign-born children, the nostalgic remembrance of the homeland activates an "archive of feeling" that also brings back raw emotions and insights about what they had endured in the homeland under the shadow of war.…”

Section: On Critical Illiteracy and The Camp As Ethical Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

Bui¹

2015

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This article explores the challenges of memorywork for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan's The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. The main character, Cherry, attempts to "reeducate" herself about her wayward kin, and while the novel may be read simply as a coming-of-age text, this major fictional work illustrates the ways second-generation subjects must recuperate convoluted histories of war to understand the causes of their own precarious life and uncertain future in the world. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting, the term "reeducation" suggests that refugee memorywork never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. It raises epistemological and moral dilemmas related to refugee subject formation, characterized by more than the condition of exile from the homeland but the active processing of postwar economic bonds and demands. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, "reeducation" links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition. This essay explores the challenges of historical knowledge production and recovery of memory for postwar subjects. Using the novel The Reeduca-The DebTs of MeMory • Bui •

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Section: On Critical Illiteracy and The Camp As Ethical Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

Bui¹

2015

jaas

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“…Viet Thanh Nguyen (2006) grapples with the essentialism of war trauma for the Vietnamese American community in "Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse." Nguyen recognizes the need to acknowledge that Vietnamese people still hold power beyond their roles as "victims," referring to both the involvement of Vietnamese people in the Vietnam War, as well as the ways in which they continue to represent themselves.…”

Section: The Vietnamese Diasporamentioning

confidence: 99%

Invoke Memory, Evoke Identity: Ethnic Identity Formation and Cultural Production in Vietnamese Culture Nights

Katie

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Vietnamese Culture Nights (VCNs) and similar student-produced, narrative-driven Vietnamese diasporic performances are widespread spatially and temporally, with productions taking place across countries outside Vietnam and some events holding 40+ years of annual shows. This research analyzes the critical concepts of Vietnamese Culture Nights and engages with them in a series of workshops that address and discuss these concepts, to better understand the effectiveness of the critical study on participants' understanding of their own ethnic identity attachment and their engagement in cultural productions, productions being both intentional performances and the daily acts of cultural production in mundane life. These critical concepts are powerful components of VCNs, but the current structures of VCNs leave little room for critical engagement. This research enacts a space where participants of Vietnamese Culture Nights can think critically, develop clarity, and enhance the genre of Vietnamese Culture Nights, for themselves and for their community.v J. R. Nguyen's (2021) examination of the Vietnamese diasporic identity reveals that "Vietnamese-ness cannot be assumed as a given in any study purporting to be about analyzing Vietnamese [insert topic here], because the contingence of the identity-established by emergent practices and discourses-is a critical element of the identity's power to compel collective actions" (11). Here, Nguyen argues that practices of cultural production in Vietnamese contexts do not necessitate that the Vietnamese identity is what is being studied, but rather that the space created expresses Vietnamese identity, even when it is not that specific identity at the forefront.Taking a step further, Nguyen establishes that while "cultural performances are thus purposefully built and staged to capture a portion of that essence of Vietnamese-ness, and diasporic identity discourses similarly revolve around preserving relevant aspects of the history, narratives, traditions, and culture of Vietnamese people-especially that of the refugees-for future generations" (p. 163) they also "constantly wrestle with this sense of existential distance and estrangement from Vietnamese-ness as an 'authentic' culture and history with a core of distinctive signifiers, discourses, and narratives" (p. 223). These thoughts will be developed further in the next critical concepts. Cultural ProductionThis research employs the constructive definition of ethnicity as expressed in the previous concept. Culture, as a dimension of ethnicity, is also a social construction. However, Nagel expresses that "culture provides the content and meaning of ethnicity; it animates and authenticates ethnic boundaries by providing a history, ideology, symbolic universe, and system of meaning" (p. 162). However, this definition is expanded by the criticism for the constructivist approach that is found within Mattijs van der Port and Birgit Meyer's (2018) discussion of

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Conclusion

Ninh¹

2017

Race, Gender, and Religion in the Vietnamese Diaspora

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Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse

Cited by 21 publications

References 19 publications

The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

The Debts of Memory: Historical Amnesia and Refugee Knowledge in The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

Invoke Memory, Evoke Identity: Ethnic Identity Formation and Cultural Production in Vietnamese Culture Nights

Conclusion

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