The American war in contemporary Vietnam [electronic resource] : transnational remembrance and representation / Christina Schwenkel.

Cover image for The American war in contemporary Vietnam [electronic resource] : transnational remembrance and representation / Christina Schwenkel.

ISBN:

9780253003317

9781282293434

Title:

The American war in contemporary Vietnam [electronic resource] : transnational remembrance and representation / Christina Schwenkel.

Author:

Schwenkel, Christina.

Personal Author:

Schwenkel, Christina.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 264 pages) : illustrations.

Series:

Tracking globalization

Contents:

Introduction: Remembering (in) Vietnam -- Return to Vietnam : redemption, reconciliation, and salvation -- Exhibiting war, reconciling pasts : photojournalism and divergent visual histories -- Commodified memories and embodied experiences of war -- Monumentalizing war : toward a new aesthetics of memory -- Contested truths : museums and regimes of representation and objectivity -- Tortured bodies and the neoliberal politics of historical unaccountability -- Conclusion: Empires of memory and knowledge production.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Foreign public opinion, Vietnamese.

Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Influence.

Public opinion -- Vietnam.

Geographic Term:

Vietnam -- Foreign relations -- United States.

United States -- Foreign relations -- Vietnam.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2009

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
959.7043 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today--in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

Author Notes

Christina Schwenkel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Anthropologist Schwenkel (Univ. of California, Riverside) addresses perhaps one of the most compelling transnational events in history. For one nation, the event was crucial as a foundation from which to challenge the great meta-narratives of modern times; from the perspective of another nation, it validated a version of modernity thickly embedded in local experiences of colonialism. Whether it is the "Vietnam" War or the "American" War, Schwenkel illustrates the continuing aftereffects of these histories as living memories in the ethnographic present of Vietnam. Fieldwork takes place in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as well as Hue and Vinh cities. This multi-sited ethnography includes experiences of mobility back and forth between Vietnam and the US that generates this transnational ethnography of knowledge production and memory-making "undergoing globalizing conditions." The final result is a compelling and rare ethnographic portrait of a historically determined out-of-the-way place revealing postmodern conditions of globalizing capital undergoing locally situated revisions--in this case, toward a "market economy with social orientation." Fascinating and a must for all readers interested in the present and the past as it is constituted in memory. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. S. Ferzacca University of Lethbridge