Yen Le Espiritu

Filipino Americans, who experience life in the United States as immigrants, colonized nationals, and racial minorities, have been little studied, though they are one of our largest immigrant groups. Based on her in-depth interviews with more than one hundred Filipinos in San Diego, California, Yen Le Espiritu investigates how Filipino women and men are transformed through the experience of migration, and how they in turn remake the social world around them. Her sensitive analysis reveals that Filipino Americans confront U.S. domestic racism and global power structures by living transnational lives that are shaped as much by literal and symbolic ties to the Philippines as they are by social, economic, and political realities in the United States. Espiritu deftly weaves vivid first-person narratives with larger social and historical contexts as she discovers the meaning of home, community, gender, and intergenerational relations among Filipinos. Among other topics, she explores the ways that female sexuality is defined in contradistinction to American mores and shows how this process becomes a way of opposing racial subjugation in this country. She also examines how Filipinos have integrated themselves into the American workplace and looks closely at the effects of colonialism.

This resource examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. This book moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering. --Publisher

"Looking Back on the Vietnam War reflects on the half-century since the 1965 U.S. escalation of conflict in Viet Nam, asking what, how, and why we know about the Vietnam War. While the war in all of its complexities is written about from a number of disciplinary perspectives, those dominant narratives often tell a limited story, one often told in isolation from other disciplinary perspectives. Looking Back suggests we take stock of the stories absent from dominant narratives of the War, and that we do that stock-taking through the lenses of multiple disciplines and perspectives. Based on the idea that Vietnamese stories, both those set in the postwar Viet Nam and also in the Vietnamese diaspora, are crucial to understanding the Vietnam War, this volume brings together essays examining Vietnamese and diasporic conditions with those examining U.S. traces of the War. Looking Back also attends to the significance of the present in the act of recollecting as it reflects on the war's echoes in the current era of endless U.S. warring. The volume engages in a dual looking back--both in the sense of remembering and of reconsidering--to offer a fuller picture of the Vietnam War by showing the perspectives of groups and issues that have largely escaped serious attention in popular narratives of the war"--