The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Y Thien Nguyen, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors.

Reviews

“Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies makes an important contribution as the first broad-based, edited volume about Vietnamese Americans by primarily Vietnamese American scholars. The many valuable chapters offer a wide range of chronicles of this diasporic community’s history over the past half century. The editors and contributors ‘let Vietnamese Americans tell their own story’—and this book does that, with a largely younger generation of Vietnamese studies scholars who have done careful, meticulous scholarly work.”—Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, and author of The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism

“Focused on the social sciences while branching into humanistic fields such as literary and archival studies, Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies makes Vietnamese histories and actors central to any study of ‘Vietnamese America.’ The interdisciplinary essays offer nuanced research and knowledge related to transnationalism, war, and war’s afterlife while linking to broader questions of diasporic histories, politics, and worldmaking. By displacing U.S.-centered frameworks, the volume also questions how critiques of U.S. empire that inform much American studies scholarship can replicate the problems of U.S.-centric thinking.”—Marguerite Nguyen, Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University, and author of America’s Vietnam: The Longue Durée of U.S. Literature and Empire

About the Author(s)

Linda Ho Peché is Project Director for the Vietnamese in the Diaspora Digital Archive, a digital humanities project by the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation.

Alex-Thai Dinh Vo is Assistant Research Professor at the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.

Tuong Vu is Professor and Department Head of Political Science, as well as Director of the U.S.-Vietnam Research Center, at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology and coeditor of The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building, among other titles.