Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors

“Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies makes an important contribution as the first broad-based, edited volume about Vietnamese Americans by primarily Vietnamese American scholars. The many valuable chapters offer a wide range of chronicles of this diasporic community’s history over the past half century. The editors and contributors ‘let Vietnamese Americans tell their own story’—and this book does that, with a largely younger generation of Vietnamese studies scholars who have done careful, meticulous scholarly work.”—Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, and author of The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism