Resistance Nationalisms: Vietnamese Political Identities and Refugee Narratives in the United States, 1945-1995

Abstract

This project explores how Vietnamese Americans across the political spectrum manipulated and subverted narratives surrounding displaced people before, during, and after the Vietnam War. In doing so, I argue, they advanced their own anticolonial agendas to contest dominant notions of race, war, and empire in both the United States and Vietnam. The dissertation consists of three parts, each of which covers a political movement in the United States spearheaded by Vietnamese nationalists. The first part disrupts the typical timeline of Vietnamese American history by tracking the rise of a left-wing Vietnamese political tradition in the United States from 1945 to 1975. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s when Vietnamese seamen formed the Vietnam-American Friendship Association to campaign for the U.S. recognition of Vietnam’s independence from France, this political tradition drove South Vietnamese exchange students to join the U.S. antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. This largely forgotten history of prominent Vietnamese left-wing activists in the United States demonstrates that anticolonialism shaped Vietnamese American political identities across the second half of the twentieth century. The second part focuses on the Homeland Restoration Movement, an anticommunist and anticolonial struggle organized by Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s to overthrow the Hanoi regime. A direct response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979 that ousted the Khmer Rouge and established a new Vietnamese-backed government in its place, the movement, I argue, encompassed and integrated anticommunism and anticolonialism among Vietnamese Americans. The third part explores how Vietnamese advanced their political agendas by cultivating, exploiting, and appropriating narratives surrounding U.S. POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia. In the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnamese refugees routinely returned to the American POW/MIA Movement to advocate on behalf of Vietnamese POWs and to intervene in debates over the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations.