America's Encounters with Vietnam: Empire, Refugees, Diasporas

Marguerite Nguyen’s America’s Vietnam: The Long Durée of U.S. Lit­ erature and Empire is a beautifully written and carefully argued book that furthers our understanding of how Vietnam has been and continues to be a shaping force for the American imagination. Undertaking the work of periodization and formal analysis, the book offers not just a cru­ cial historiography of the Vietnam War, but also a novel genealogy for American literary history via an exploration of the United States’ long engagement—beyond just the militaristic kind—with the geographically small but politically and culturally significant nation of Vietnam. Situated in and contributing to a number of fields including Asian American stu­ dies, critical refugee studies, diaspora studies, and American studies, America’s Vietnam is an original take on a well-studied topic, or what some view as an “over-documented” war in American history. It does this by insisting on a long historical view, one that does not take the Viet­ nam War and the years after its end as a starting point for the analysis of “America’s Vietnam.” Instead, Nguyen draws attention to the “pre­ conflict contexts that must inform our comprehension of the war’s enduring effects in the present” (3). In doing so, Nguyen emphasizes and illuminates the “multidimensionality of ‘Vietnam’” (147), whereby the sig­ nifier is not a fixed or given entity, but a historically contingent and dis­ cursively produced formation that has served different cultural and political ends at particular moments in time. Although it is rooted in the specific context of Vietnam, the book of­ fers broader insights into the emergence and development of American empire, transnational and diasporic networks, and the co-constitution