The Vietnamese Diaspora In A Transnational Context

This collection examines aspects of the Vietnamese diaspora resettlement experience in various national settings. It investigates issues such as community politics, identity formation, generational conflicts and how different conditions of exit from Vietnam have created fractures within the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora.

The Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of Vietnamese migrations and diasporas, including the post-1975 diaspora, one of the most significant and highly visible diasporas of the late twentieth century. This handbook delves into the processes of Vietnamese migration and highlights the variety of Vietnamese diasporic journeys, trajectories and communities as well as the richness and depth of Vietnamese diasporic literary and cultural production. The contributions across the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, film studies and cultural studies point to the diversity of approaches relating to scholarship on Vietnamese diasporas.The handbook is structured in five parts: Colonial legacies Refugees, histories and communities Migrant workers, international students and mobilities Literary and cultural production Diasporas and negotiations Offering multiple cutting-edge interpretations, representations and reconstructions of diaspora and the diasporic experience, this first reference work of the Vietnamese diaspora will be an invaluable tool for students and researchers in the fields of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Refugee Studies, Transnational Studies and Migration and Diaspora Studies.

Is Trauma a transhistorical, transnational phenomenon? Gender and Trauma challenges the standard history that has led to our contemporary understanding of psychological trauma to answer this question, and to explore the impact of gender in the experience and understanding of emotional distress. Bringing together eleven case studies from all over the world, it draws on methods from history, gender and communication studies to consider how trauma has been understood over the 20th and 21st centuries. Encompassing histories from Australia, Britain, Indonesia, Italy, the Soviet Union, Timor Leste, the United States and Vietnam, these examples demonstrate how gender and trauma are inextricably linked, and how the term 'trauma' has evolved over time. With chapters on war, political repression, displacement, rape and childbirth, the cases showcased in this volume highlight two pivotal transformations across the 20th century. First, the transformation of the trauma sufferer from perpetrator to victim, and second, the increased understanding of psychological consequences of sexual assault and domestic violence. Together, these diverse stories yield a more nuanced picture of what trauma is, how we have understood it alongside gender in the past, and how this affects our understanding of it in the present.

In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration. Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to.

This book examines how the racialization of religion facilitates the diasporic formation of ethnic Vietnamese in the U.S. and Cambodia, two communities that have been separated from one another for nearly 30 years. It compares devotion to female religious figures in two minority religions, the Virgin Mary among the Catholics and the Mother Goddess among the Caodaists. Visual culture and institutional structures are examined within both communities. Thien-Huong Ninh invites a critical re-thinking of how race, gender, and religion are proxies for understanding, theorizing, and addressing social inequalities within global contexts.

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

This book brings together extensive recent innovative research on the study of men and masculinities in Southeast Asia. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, the book examines both dominant and marginal constructions of heterosexual masculinity and the ways in which these are performed in different localized contexts in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. Through the presentation of detailed ethnographic studies on topics ranging from the professional practices of Filipino merchant seafarers to the sex lives of Thai migrant workers to the stand-over tactics of Indonesian gangsters, the authors in this collection challenge the idea of emerging globalizing forms of masculinities. Where existing studies of gender in Asia tend to concentrate on women, East Asia and gay men, this book fills a significant gap and demonstrates, overall, how gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality shape contemporary understandings of what it means to be a ‘man’ in contemporary Southeast Asia.

At the Heart of Work and Family presents original research on work and family by scholars who engage and build on the conceptual framework developed by well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. These concepts, such as "the second shift," "the economy of gratitude," "emotion work," "feeling rules," "gender strategies," and "the time bind," are basic to sociology and have shaped both popular discussions and academic study. The common thread in these essays covering the gender division of housework, childcare networks, families in the global economy, and children of consumers is the incorporation of emotion, feelings, and meaning into the study of working families. These examinations, like Hochschild's own work, connect micro-level interaction to larger social and economic forces and illustrate the continued relevance of linking economic relations to emotional ones for understanding contemporary work-family life.