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Body Counts : The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees

By: Espiritu, Yen LeMaterial type: TextTextSeries: eBooks on DemandPublisher: Berkeley : University of California Press, 2014Description: 1 online resource (265 p.)ISBN: 9780520959002Subject(s): Social conflict | Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Influence | Vietnam War, 1961-1975 | Violence | War and societyGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version:: Body Counts : The Vietnam War and Militarized RefugeesDDC classification: 303.6072 | 959.704/3 LOC classification: DS557.7Online resources: Click here to view this ebook.
Contents:
Cover; Body Counts; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; 1. Critical Refuge(e) Studies; 2. Militarized Refuge(es); 3. Refugee Camps and the Politics of Living; 4. The "Good Warriors" and the "Good Refugee"; 5. Refugee Remembering-and Remembrance; 6. Refugee Postmemories: The "Generation After"; 7. "The Endings That Are Not Over"; Notes; References; Index
Summary: Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, a
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Electronic Book UT Tyler Online
Online 		DS557.7 (Browse shelf) http://uttyler.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1711008 Available EBL1711008

Cover; Body Counts; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; 1. Critical Refuge(e) Studies; 2. Militarized Refuge(es); 3. Refugee Camps and the Politics of Living; 4. The "Good Warriors" and the "Good Refugee"; 5. Refugee Remembering-and Remembrance; 6. Refugee Postmemories: The "Generation After"; 7. "The Endings That Are Not Over"; Notes; References; Index

Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, a

Description based upon print version of record.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Espiritu (ethnic studies, Univ. of California San Diego) uses the experiences of Vietnamese Americans to reexamine the meaning of the Vietnam War for US national identity. The book may be inaccessible to many readers because there is no historical overview or even a time line of the war. Chapters 2 and 3 review the refugee migration and camps from 1975 to 1995. Chapter 4 eloquently conveys the main point of the book: the US invokes the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees to restore a positive national image badly damaged by the failure to win the war. Examples include media commemorations of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of Saigon in 1975. Chapter 5 is an interesting discussion of how Vietnamese American veterans use monuments, Internet sites, and street names to commemorate their losses. Chapter 6 is pathbreaking because it documents that younger Vietnamese Americans often grow up knowing little about the Vietnam War. Their parents wish to shield them from traumatic memories, and high school history textbooks ignore the horrific Vietnamese civilian casualties during the war. Lao, Cambodian, and Hmong refugees would be very good examples of the author's thesis but are virtually never mentioned in the book. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty. --Jeremy Hein, University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Yen Le Espiritu combines scholarship with personal experience in her writings about the Asian-American experience. A Vietnamese American whose husband is Filipino, Espiritu seeks to understand and to communicate through her writing the many facets of modern Asian experiences in the United States. She wrote. "I still find pan-Asian American ethnicity a complex and changing topic, often defying sociological interpretations and generalizations." Her objectives are to take seriously the differences among Asian groups without glossing over important ethnic differences.

Espiritu's published books include Filipino American Lives, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities, and Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love, in addition to articles in scholarly journals.

Espiritu teaches in the Ethnic Studies program of the University of California, San Diego.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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