Viet Thanh Nguyen

This project examines the ways that diverse populations in Viet Nam and the United States have remembered the Viet Nam War, particularly via literary and visual cultures from the 1960s until the present. It’s a major departure from earlier monographs on the war, which have had narrower cultural, national, or disciplinary concerns. This study investigates how war memories are fashioned in both countries through art, literature, cinema, photography, memorials, and museums. Its ultimate goal, besides weaving American and Vietnamese memories together within multicultural and international contexts, is determining how to forge an ethical memory, one that draws attention to the inequality of memory, the inevitability of forgetting, and the difficulty of reconciliation.