Returns of War
South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4157909 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jerry Lembcke (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 537-538 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaz490 |
| OpenAlex | W2969608434 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
More than a history of Vietnamese emigration and refugee resettlement abroad, Returns of War is Long T. Bui's challenge to “the view of the Vietnam War as ‘over’” (p. 201). In it, he adroitly musters the historical record, critical cultural studies, and political economy to “[theorize] South Vietnam as an incomplete, ongoing search for personal and personal freedom” (back cover). Returns of War refers most prosaically to the return of refugeed Vietnamese to the former South Vietnam, often with their accumulated fortunes turned into investment capital. But before getting to that in a chapter that parses the many iterations of “Vietnamization,” he plies the metaphorical senses of “return” as they manifest in social memory, representations in literary fiction, and public commemoration. Bui's conceptual creativity is a signature quality of the book. The distinction he makes between dismemberment and rememberment is intriguing: the first referring to the fragmenting of communities by the privileged remembering of some identities over others, e.g., the military veterans of the Saigon government over women and familial identities; the second referring to the efforts to “reassemble broken lives” into something whole and workable for the future through the use of art and cultural practices to reconstruct a South Vietnamese national identity (p. 89). He brings that distinction to life by recounting veterans' opposition to a 2009 “Art Speaks” show in Santa Ana, California, organized by women. The show's lean toward nonmilitary imagery was seen by veterans' groups as communist-inspired feminism and an affront to masculinity
Communism · Historiography · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Vietnam War · Vietnamese · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cambodian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |