Constructing Postmemory in Vietnamese American Literature

Abstract

Portion of Introduction: Isabelle Pelaud, a scholar whose expertise is in Vietnamese American literature and art, is the first scholar to publish a book-length study of Vietnamese American literature. In This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011), Pelaud describes the Vietnam War as "Vietnamese refugees' tears, losses, and blood were suddenly reinserted into the historical narrative" (7). For many Vietnamese refugees, immigrating to America was a source of suffering that they generally associated with a sense of loss and longing for the families they had left behind in Vietnam. As a result of the immigrants' experiences, of the writing of Vietnamese refugees is, as literary scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen argue, "about the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing" ("Speak" 8). Why is mourning the dead a challenge? Why are these memories so imoortant to Vietnamese American writers that their works deal again and again with the past? How do their memories affect the next generations, those who did not experience the War directly, and how can and do writers of the following generations deal with the memories of the Vietnam War and its aftermath?Master of ArtsEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112023/1/Kang2015_ConstructingPostmemoryVietnameseAmericanLit.pd