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  • Distanced from DirtTransnational Vietnam in the U.S. South
  • Cynthia Wu (bio)

In Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Literature, 1930–1990, Patricia Yaeger stakes a claim for continued inquiry—which in the year 2000 may have been necessary—into the literary production that has emerged from the U.S. South. Although it may seem that “[t]o revisit the white texts spawned in the Jim Crow South … is to exit from the contemporary excitements of African, Asian, or Latin American studies, to go South to a very Old Place” (61), Yaeger convincingly argues for the ongoing relevance of southern literature by both white and black authors. I want to redirect, however, this affirmation of her archive in the face of U.S. ethnic studies’ transnational commitments, a turn in the 1990s that injected new interest into the study of communities of color in the United States. Might the concerns that have preoccupied southern studies exist in closer proximity to contemporary U.S. ethnic studies than we have previously thought? Might the South have anything to tell us about histories of imperialism and the coerced or forced migrations spurred among racialized subjects?1 My answer is a resounding “yes,” particularly when we pay heed to the legacies of the Vietnam War.

Yaeger posits that for those who do not fit neatly into the South’s rules about proper racial, gender, and sexual comportment, dirt is hermeneutically transformative. For us as readers, looking closely is key to understanding “what happens to the body within a culture of neglect” (67) that refuses to recognize the corporeal integrity of those who are thrown away. The Vietnam War has provided yet another set [End Page 170] of regulatory mechanisms to consider in addition to those that Dirt and Desire addresses. Supplementing the structuralist binaries that Yaeger troubles between black and white or man and woman, the war’s long wake has blurred the lines between Vietnamese national and diasporic subject. Yet, the filmic narrative I consider, set in the U.S. South, suggests that despite the erosion of this one boundary, the war has solidified another in a global economy greased by neoliberal capital—that between rich and poor.

Scholars of southern literature such as Doris Betts and Michael Kreyling have observed that as of the late twentieth century, a soul searching about one’s complicity in a morally bankrupt war is no longer regionally specific (Betts 5; Kreyling, Inventing 121–122). What the Vietnam War did was to transpose the subjectivities of those living in the former Confederacy onto the nation at large. Kreyling claims that contemporary southern narratives that address the Civil War use this nineteenth-century military conflict to articulate memories of the Vietnam War “by exchanging a ‘safer’ martial memory for one still dangerous” (Postsouthern Memory 114). What remain hidden in the discourses of the Vietnam War’s aftermath—be they at the level of the reckoning that Americans perform amongst themselves or at the level of restoring international diplomacy between formerly warring nations—are the class divisions within the Vietnamese transnation. Gestures of healing and reconciliation, even when they involve actual Vietnamese subjects, ultimately benefit the most structurally privileged. The interests of those closest to dirt, as Yaeger might put it, are shuttled into obscurity in a politics complicit with neoliberal capital. These manifestations and elisions are poignantly conveyed in a feature-length film produced and released shortly after the normalization of U.S.–Vietnam diplomatic relations in 1995.

Mai’s America (2002) is an account of a Vietnamese teenager’s stint as an exchange student at a high school in Mississippi. The subject of the documentary is from a well-to-do family in Hanoi and is of the generation born after her country’s war with the United States. Upon her arrival in the small Mississippi town, Mai stays with a working class white family. Her attempts to bond with her initial hosts fail, and she asks her agency for another placement whereupon she moves into the home of a middle class African American couple. Over the course of her senior year, Mai interacts with a mix of students at her school, meets a group...

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