Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora by Nguyễn, Nathalie Huỳnh Châu;

Short description:

This handbook presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of Vietnamese migrations and diasporas, and will be an invaluable tool for Asian/ Asian American/ Refugee Studies, and Migration and Diaspora Studies.

Long description:

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:

1. Colonial legacies


2. Refugees, histories and communities


3. Migrant workers, international students and mobilities


4. Literary and cultural production


5. 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.

‘Nathalie Nguyen assembled an outstanding group of 20 international scholars for this impressive collection of essays on different aspects of Vietnamese diasporic experiences around the world. The essays show not only the complexities of Vietnamese diasporas but also how different these complexities are. They reveal a range of connections to Vietnam and to the countries where diasporic Vietnamese have settled. The images of losses, findings, adjustments and developments in the book challenge thought about a single Vietnamese diaspora.’

– Professor Olga Dror, Texas A&M University

‘Essential reading for students of the Vietnamese diaspora, this volume reflects the multi-sided aspect of the subject, offering approaches that span history, anthropology, sociology as well as literary and cultural studies to form an account that is simultaneously wide-ranging and precise. It is also, perhaps more surprisingly, often movingly informed by personal emotion. Nathalie Nguyen’s editorial feat offers a model for a nuanced understanding of the complexities of diaspora, at times reading like a test case for wider issues such as compassion fatigue, forced repatriations, multi-generational memory and memorialisation.’

– Professor Jennifer Yee, University of Oxford

Table of Contents:

List of table x

1 Vietnamese diasporas: An introduction 1

2 Documentary film memorialisation of Vietnamese indentured labour in France and New Caledonia: Sighting history 29

3 The post–World War II repatriation of immigrant Vietnamese workers: For the metropole or for the homeland? 46

4 The archipelago of camps: Between Vietnam and the diaspora 69

5 The Vietnamese diaspora in Germany: Refugees, contract workers and migrants 85

Frank Bösch

6 The Vietnamese diaspora in Japan: Refugees and internationalisation 104

7 A brief history of the Vietnamese diaspora in the UK: Migration, resettlement and social characteristics 123

8 Refugee histories and the COVID-19 pandemic: Second-generation Vietnamese Australians in the health professions 140

9 Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic: Busy entrepreneurs and their children 163

10 Food practices, transnational identity and belonging of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow: Nostalgic consumption 183

11 Navigating a postcolonial, capitalist and neoliberal world: A comparison of Vietnamese international students’ and migrant workers’ mobilities 201

12 Linda Lê: Migrant Writer M/other 219

13 The transdiasporic turn towards multiplicity in contemporary Francophone and American Việt Kiều literature 238

14 Memory Moments in Vietnamese American cultural productions 253

15 Ghostly brothers and spectral relations in Vietnamese diasporic literature 270

Catherine H. Nguyen

16 Diasporic Vietnamese metafiction of the 1.5 and second generations 292

17 Refugee memories in Vietnamese diasporic films 307

18 Reading for food in diasporic Vietnamese narrative cookbooks 323

19 The diasporic intellectual self-concept: The case of Vietnamese intellectuals in North America 343

20 Creating space for negotiations of experiences and knowledge for a more inclusive research practice in diaspora studies: The ‘in-between’ 361