America's Vietnam

Americas Vietnam challenges the prevailing genealogy of Vietnams emergence in the American imaginationone that presupposes the Vietnam War as the starting point of meaningful Vietnamese-U.S. political and cultural involvements. Examining literature from as early as the 1820s, Marguerite Nguyen takes a comparative, long historical approach to interpreting constructions of Vietnam in American literature. She analyzes works in various genres published in English and Vietnamese by Monique Truong and Michael Herr as well as lesser-known writers such as John White, Harry Hervey, and V Phin. The books cross-cultural prism spans Paris, Saigon, New York, and multiple oceans, and its departure from Cold War frames reveals rich cross-period connections. Americas Vietnam recounts a mostly unexamined story of Southeast Asias lasting and varied influence on U.S. aesthetic and political concerns. Tracking Vietnams transition from an emergent nation in the nineteenth century to a French colony to a Vietnamese-American war zone, Nguyen demonstrates that how authors represent Vietnam is deeply entwined with the United States shifting role in the world. As Americas longstanding presence in Vietnam evolves, the literature it generates significantly revises our perceptions of war, race, and empire over time.