Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination

While the Vietnam War shook the American national psyche, giving rise to a malady or “syndrome” that positions the United States as the primary player and victim of the War, its fighting and aftermath was in fact an international affair, enmeshed as it was with Third World anti-colonial movements and the larger Cold War. This special issue traces the global reach of imaginative formations of Vietnam created in the War’s aftermath, investigating the many ways Vietnam and its diaspora continue to be registered through engagements with the US and other international actors. In the articles that follow, we position Vietnam (the country and its multiple wars of decolonization) on a wider world stage—the “global imagination”—in order to understand its historical, political, and affective co-ordinates, charting the expansive afterlives that emerged after war. Over four decades after the “end” of America’s Vietnam War, we ask, what legacies, afterlives, and epistemologies remain? In what locations—countries, texts, memories, bodies—and temporalities (past, present, future) do these remains manifest and become intelligible? What are the stakes of further contemplating this “over-documented” war that carries with it such difficult memories?

In her 2006 titular article, Yến Lê Espiritu initiated the field of “critical refugee studies,” wresting the Vietnamese refugee figure from dominant American representations of the Vietnam War that sought to elide, exalt, or pathologize it. In contrast to American texts and films that focused on the existential experience of the US Vietnam War veteran, the activism of the domestic anti-war protestor, or the benevolence of the federal government-turned-humanitarian saviour, Espiritu recentred the subjectivity of Vietnamese refugees in order to draw attention to the “crucial issues of race, war, and violence” (“Toward” 426). Spanning the fields of ethnic studies, American studies, literature, history, ethnography, and performance studies, subsequent scholarship has investigated Vietnamese refugees’ affective structures of debt, complex enunciations of anti-Communist politics, and role in evidencing US imperialism in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, among other topics.¹ These important interdisciplinary studies analyze how the Vietnam War and its diaspora index critiques of militarism, transnational racism, and US empire.

This special issue builds upon Espiritu’s intervention, and burgeoning scholarship in critical refugee studies, to further map the transnational co-ordinates of Vietnam, the War, and its afterlives in the global imagination. Whereas the field until now has focused on Vietnamese refugees in the United States as its privileged site of analysis—an understandable locus given that the majority of Vietnam War refugees resettled in the US after 1975—we extend our analyses across time and space, reaching back to the transnational history of French colonialism in Vietnam up to the fraught present of diasporic life under Trump, and exploring how the Vietnam War resonated and continues to resonate in such diverse locales as Palestine, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and Canada. Attending to the “crucial issues of race, war, and violence” need not—indeed, should not—inadvertently reproduce a logic of American exceptionalism. As such, the articles in this special issue work to dislodge the United States’ role in overdetermining diasporic Vietnamese passages and politics, which both intersect with the Vietnam War and exceed it.

As both Vietnamese people and Vietnam are continually discussed in a remarkably comparative manner, we ask through what means Vietnamese history, culture, and bodies become integrated, differentiated, or deployed in transnational dialogue. While the US and its allies have traditionally played a dominant role in defining the reception and value of Vietnamese bodies, we turn to archival, cultural, and social texts to examine how a series of counter-memories, negative affects, and commercial desires work together to imagine possible futures for Vietnam, Vietnamese diasporics, and other refugees. The Canadian Review of American Studies—a journal that attends to studies of US empire while simultaneously interrogating its presumed centrality—is a fitting vessel for the intellectual project this group of essays collectively forwards.

We begin with Timothy K. August’s “All the Promise in the World: Mobilizing Comparison in The Book of Salt,” which...