Negotiating Memories of War: Arts in the Vietnamese American Communities

In the United States, the writing on the Vietnam War involves the highly organized and strategic forgetting of the Vietnamese people. In a highly original work that investigates the production of American cultural memory, Marita Sturken shows that in the United States, the narrative of the Vietnam War foregrounds the painful experience of the Vietnam veterans in such a way that the Vietnamese people are forgotten: “They are conspicuously absent in their roles as collaborators, victims, enemies, or simply the people whose hand and over whom (supposedly) this war was fought” (Sturken 1997, 62). Likewise, US scholars have refused to treat Vietnamese refugees as genuine subjects, with their own history, culture, heritage, and political agendas.