Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) by Yen Le Espiritu (review)

Abstract

BODY COUNTS: Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). By Yen Le Espiritu. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014.In 2006, when Yen Le Espiritu published her seminal piece, The 'We-Win-EvenWhen-We-Lose' Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the 'Fall of Saigon' in American Quarterly, she was at the cusp of the wave of important new scholarship in refugee studies. Body Counts represents only a fuller extension of her work on the topic, but also a thorough elaboration of her deeper meditations about U.S. Empire and war for nearly two decades. A seasoned scholar of ethnic studies, Espiritu has produced numerous volumes on ethnic and immigrant experiences. This, however, is her first full-length exploration of refugees from Vietnam and she does it with commanding authority.As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, questions still linger as the United States engages in war in various parts of the Middle East. This timely and explicitly interdisciplinary book situates war within a complex web of empire, politics, militarism, and state policies that affect polities and populations. Her insistence on alternative ways to think about the history and memory of the Vietnam War powerfully reimagines remembrance by refugee subjects. Espiritu's feminist approach to illuminating private grief and public commemoration requires a methodology that engages in a critical juxtaposing of events, stories, and cultural practices that stitch together and make visible histories that were previously unexamined (21). Drawing from traditional and nontraditional sources such as her personal (often haunting) memories of the Vietnam War, oral interviews, archives, newspaper accounts, and sociological surveys, Body Counts pieces together what has been missing from dominant memories of the Vietnam War.Chapter One introduces readers to the field of refugee studies by discussing the significance of the title of the book. Espiritu poignantly flips what was commonly referred to as body counts, a military practice of counting confirmed kills that connoted progress during the Vietnam War, to insist that Vietnamese bodies be counted and accounted for throughout her study. Espiritu argues that the figure of the Vietnamese refugee should function not as an object of investigation but as a site of social critique (3) that enables a theoretical unraveling of the refugee category. Scholars have historically dealt with refugee subjects as a problem to be resolved by the nation-state. …