Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized RefugeesBody Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the "damage-centered" approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering. |
Contents
| 1 | |
2 Militarized Refugees | 24 |
3 Refugee Camps and the Politics of Living | 49 |
4 The Good Warriors and the Good Refugee | 81 |
5 Refugee Rememberingand Remembrance | 105 |
The Generation After | 139 |
7 The Endings That Are Not Over | 171 |
Notes | 189 |
| 217 | |
| 241 | |
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accessed American studies anticommunist April argues arrived ARVN Asian American assimilation asylum Babylift boat Body Counts bombs California Camp Pendleton chapter Clark closed camps colonial commemoration communist critiques cultural dead depicting detention centers diaspora displaced economic Eden Center Espiritu ethnic Fall of Saigon first-asylum countries fleeing freedom gees ghosts Guam Hong Kong human humanitarian Ibid immigrant interview Marine McAlister 2005 militarized refuge(es military bases model minority narrative nation Nguyen Nguyên-Vo online memorials Operation Babylift Pacific Palawan parents percent Pham Philippines political postwar PRPC Pulau Bidong racial reeducation camp refu refugee camps remember repatriated reporters Republic of Vietnam role scholars silence social South Vietnamese soldier Southeast Asia space stories street names Sturken Thúy tion Tran twenty-fifth anniversary U.S. military United Việt Vietnam veterans Vietnamese American Vietnamese community Vietnamese lives Vietnamese refugees violence Yoneyama young Vietnamese Americans