The Viet Nam War/The American War
Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives
University of Massachusetts Press
This book seeks to reformulate the canon of writings on what is called "the Viet Nam War" in America and "the American War" in Viet Nam. Until recently, the accepted canon has consisted almost exclusively of American white male combat narratives, which often reflect and perpetuate Asian stereotypes. Renny Christopher introduces material that displays a bicultural perspective, including works by Vietnamese exile writers and by lesser-known Euro-Americans who attempt to bridge the cultural gap.
Christopher traces the history of American stereotyping of Asians and shows how Euro-American ethnocentricity has limited most American authors' ability to represent fairly the Vietnamese in their stories. By giving us access to Vietnamese representations of the war, she creates a context for understanding the way the war was experienced from the "other" side, and she offers perceptive, well-documented analyses of how and why Americans have so emphatically excised the Vietnamese from narratives about a war fought in their own country.
Christopher traces the history of American stereotyping of Asians and shows how Euro-American ethnocentricity has limited most American authors' ability to represent fairly the Vietnamese in their stories. By giving us access to Vietnamese representations of the war, she creates a context for understanding the way the war was experienced from the "other" side, and she offers perceptive, well-documented analyses of how and why Americans have so emphatically excised the Vietnamese from narratives about a war fought in their own country.
Provides a vital corrective to the misrepresentations of the war that have plagued us for so long and allowed us to construct Viet Nam as the exclusive tragedy of the United States. I learned a great deal from her book, which I will use in my own writing and teaching.'—Lynne Hanley, author of Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory
'As far as I know, there has been no study like this one, which spans a broad range of Vietnamese and Euro-American works in a comparative context. Christopher's socioliterary exploration of the ways Asians have been imaged in the discourse of several wars and significant social events is brilliant.'—Vince Gotera, author of Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans
Renny Christopher is assistant professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus.
