Looking Back on the Vietnam War embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why. Each essay examines a different facet of the Vietnam War, offering fresh insights on the war’s long-term psychological, social, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. By putting these diverse pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies.
Chronology
Note on the Text
Introduction: Looking Back at the Vietnam War
Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim
Chapter 1: Vietnamese Refugees and Internet Memorials: When Does War End and Who Gets to Decide?
Y?n Lê Espiritu
Chapter 2: Broken, but Not Forsaken: Disabled South Vietnamese Veterans in Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora
Quan Tue Tran
Chapter 3: What Is Vietnamese American Literature?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Chapter 4: Vi?t Nam and the Diaspora: Absence, Presence, and the Archive
Lan Duong
Chapter 5: Liberal Humanitarianism and Post–Cold War Cultural Politics: The Case of Le Ly Hayslip
Jeehyun Lim
Chapter 6: Ann Hui’s Boat People: Documenting Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong
Vinh Nguyen
Chapter 7: “The Deep Black Hole”: Vietnam in the Memories of Australian Veterans and Refugees
Robert Mason and Leonie Jones
Chapter 8: Missing Bodies and Homecoming Spirits
Heonik Kwon
Chapter 9: Agent Orange: Toxic Chemical, Narrative of Suffering, Metaphor for War
Diane Niblack Fox
Chapter 10: Re-Seeing Cambodia and Recollecting The ’Nam: A Vertiginous Critique of the Military Sublime
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Chapter 11: Naturalizing War: The Stories We Tell about the Vietnam War
Brenda M. Boyle
Appendix A: Archives
Appendix B: Publications since 2000
Notes on Contributors
Index
BRENDA M. BOYLE is an associate professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She was a military intelligence officer in West Germany during the Cold War, and she is the author and editor of several books including Themes in Contemporary American Fiction: The Vietnam War.
JEEHYUN LIM is an assistant professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She is the author of the forthcoming book Bilingual Brokers: Race, Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Bilingualism.