In Four Decades On, historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam. They address matters such as the daunting tasks facing the Vietnamese at the war's end—including rebuilding a nation and consolidating a socialist revolution while fending off China and the Khmer Rouge—and "the Vietnam syndrome," the cynical, frustrated, and pessimistic sense that colored America's views of the rest of the world after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The contributors provide unexpected perspectives on Agent Orange, the POW/MIA controversies, the commercial trade relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and representations of the war and its aftermath produced by artists, particularly writers. They show how the war has continued to affect not only international relations but also the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Most of the contributors take up matters in the United States, Vietnam, or both nations, while several utilize transnational analytic frameworks, recognizing that the war's legacies shape and are shaped by dynamics that transcend the two countries.
Contributors. Alex Bloom, Diane Niblack Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Walter Hixson, Heonik Kwon, Scott Laderman, Mariam B. Lam, Ngo Vinh Long, Edwin A. Martini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Christina Schwenkel, Charles Waugh
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: National Amnesia, Transnational Memory, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War - Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini
- 1. Legacies Foretold: Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam - Ngo Vinh Long
- 2. Viet Nam and “Vietnam” in American History and Memory - Walter L. Hixson
- 3. “The Mainspring in This Country Has Been Broken”: America’s Battered Sense of Self and the Emergence of the Vietnam Syndrome - Alexander Bloom
- 4. Cold War in a Vietnamese Community - Heonik Kwon
- 5. The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes - Christina Schwenkel
- 6. Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature - Viet Thanh Nguyen
- 7. Việt Nam’s Growing Pains: Postsocialist Cinema Development and Transnational Politics - Mariam B. Lam
- 8. A Fishy Affair: Vietnamese Seafood and the Confrontation with U.S. Neoliberalism - Scott Laderman
- 9. Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy - Diane Niblack Fox
- 10. Refuge to Refuse: Seeking Balance in the Vietnamese Environmental Imagination - Charles Waugh
- 11. Missing in Action in the Twenty-First Century - H. Bruce Franklin
- Bibliography
- About the Contributors
- Index
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