Viet Thanh Nguyen

Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique

This article considers the challenges facing Southeast Asian American studies and the interventions the nascent field can make, particularly into Asian American studies, Southeast Asian studies, and American studies. Nguyen argues for dislodging the implicit identity politics and nationalism of these three fields, recognizing the importance of foregrounding war as a framework for linking Southeast Asian American experiences to a fundamental activity of the US military- industrial complex, and working through the challenges thus raised for these disciplines and their traditional modes and objects of inquiry.

Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature

All wars are fought twice, the fi rst time on the battlefi eld, the second time in memory. So it is with what Americans call the “Vietnam War,” and what Vietnamese call the “American War.” The signifi cance of this war for the United States and the way it would be remembered is expressed succinctly in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prophecy of 1967, in which he said that “if America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’” (Carson 144). From the perspectives of many artists working on the war, the American soul was indeed poisoned, but not fatally. It would be art’s task to perform both the diagnosis and to provide the treatment for the American body politic, wounded and staggered by its failures in Southeast Asia. The fact that this treatment would hardly be a cure is borne out by the current symptoms displayed by the American body politic, its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are telling indicators of a persistent and ongoing American syndrome, the bellicose urge for violence and domination. Faced with this syndrome, writers who have remembered the war have explicitly insisted, or have implicitly shown their readers, that some of the tools of the literary trade are the very same habits of the spirit that the American body politic needs to temper its aggressive disposition. These tools and