The American Dream in Vietnamese

Notes

141 Notes Introduction 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 2. I will use the terms Vietnamese exile performers, exilic performers, diasporic performers, and Vietnamese American performers interchangeably throughout my work. Vietnamese exilic performers, unlike the Vietnamese nationals with whom they disidentify, come from all over the world as refugees who escaped Vietnam in and after 1975. A majority of them have since immigrated to the United States and resettled in Southern California’s Little Saigon, the entertainment capital of the Vietnamese diaspora. Exile performers tour the globe entertaining fans dispersed all over the world, but they are not allowed to return to Vietnam. If they decide to return and perform for Vietnamese audiences in Vietnam, they will not only have placed their careers in jeopardy but also have risked the chance of being branded as “communist sympathizers” by the exile community. 3. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), 142. 4. Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 5. Monique T. D. Truong, “The Emergence of Voices: Vietnamese American Literature 1975–1990,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 3 (1993): 27–50. 6. The 1990s signified a new transition in Vietnamese society in which the government adopted doi moi or “new society,” a perestroika for Vietnam whereby a different attitude opened up the nation to cultural and social influences from abroad. 7. Scholars and authors who meditate on “transnational” Vietnamese relations have pointed to the liberal potential of these flexible flows, but some also warn of the potential dangers of the discrepant disparities between those who live in Vietnam and those who have left. See Caroline Kieu Linh Valverde, “Making Transnational Viet Nam: Vietnamese American Community Linkages though Money, Music and Modems” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002); Hung Cam Thai, For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Andrew Lam, Perfume 142 Notes to Introduction Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (San Francisco: Heyday Books, 2005); and Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage across the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (New York: Picador USA, 2000). 8. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Taylor & Francis, 1981), 227–41. In his chapter entitled “The Sweet Buy and Buy,” George Lipsitz stresses the fact that the greatest profits no longer come from marketing the same item to more and more consumers, but rather from the creation of specialty markets that derive their profitability from differentiation. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 261. 9. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (1979; repr., New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 123–48. 10. Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 143. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 13. At the start of this project, videocassette was the preferred form of media for this community. As videocassette technology becomes increasingly outdated, it is replaced by DVDs and video CDs (VCDs). 14. Robert Scholes, “Power and Pleasure in Video Texts,” in Videos, Icons, and Values, ed. Alan M. Olson, Christopher Parr, and Debra Parr (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), 85. 15. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993). 16. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 22. 17. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 18. I see my work to be in conversation with texts that have been published in the last decade that do address these intersections. These include: Sunaina Maira, Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Politics of Space (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2000); Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Sandya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar...