Southern Memory, Southern Metaphor: Representing South Vietnam through the US South

Abstract:This essay takes the juxtaposition of South Vietnamese and Confederate flags at the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot as a point of departure for thinking through southern metaphors and southern memories connecting South Vietnam and the US South. It analyzes cultural productions by 1.5 generation South Vietnamese refugees—Andrew Lam's short story "Show and Tell" and An-My Lê's photographic series Silent General—to trace the ways in which South Vietnam has been represented through the iconography and vernacular of the US South. What links South Vietnam and the US South is a distinct articulation of southern memory and memorialization, forged in the wake of southern civil war defeat. Southern memory, however, is always already contested, manifesting in the US context either as Lost Cause mythology or as Black abolitionist remembrance. Southern memory and southern metaphor thus open up space for contingencies and interventions, to route South Vietnamese diasporic politics through Black freedom struggles instead of Confederate nostalgia. Overall, this essay interrogates what critiques of empire and white supremacy are enabled by juxtaposing South Vietnam and the US South: two seemingly conservative southern spaces that do not easily cohere to the anti-imperialist, Third World Liberationist politics typically associated with the "Global South."