Abstract:

Despite the prominence of the Vietnam War in late 20th-century American literature and culture, the growing body of writing by Vietnamese Americans has received very little attention to date. Critical discourse remains limited by U.S.-centered notions of the Vietnamese as wartime enemies or perpetual foreigners. This dissertation maps the current trajectory of Vietnamese American work, with a specific focus on how Vietnamese American writers and filmmakers are extending and challenging U.S. paradigms for understanding "Vietnam." An overarching theme is the role of collaboration and coauthorship in defining Vietnamese American self-expression. While many well-known texts celebrate the representation of "both sides" by including Vietnamese voices alongside American ones, several Vietnamese American writers instead use collaborative approaches to assert Vietnamese ethnic identity as integral, rather than in contrast or counterpoint, to American national identity.

Chapter One explores how literary anthologies position Vietnamese American work within the contemporary U.S. canon, examining the different editorial approaches behind collections such as Stewart O'Nan's The Vietnam Reader , Wayne Karlin's The Other Side of Heaven , and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Watermark . Chapter Two treats the question of American-Vietnamese coauthorial relationships in the autobiographies of Tran Thi Nga (Shallow Graves ) and Le Ly Hayslip (When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace ). In Chapter Three, I provide a close reading of Lan Cao's multiple-protagonist novel Monkey Bridge . Finally, Chapter Four treats Vietnamese American representation and self-expression in film through the joint productions of brothers Tony Bui and Timothy Linh Bui: Three Seasons and Green Dragon . Throughout, I emphasize the importance of reading Vietnamese American work not just as commentary on the war and its aftermath, but as literature of much broader relevance--helping to remake the relationship between the U.S. and modern-day Vietnam, to expand the borders of Asian American literature, and to illuminate the changing contours of American ethnicity.