‘Like a foreigner in my own homeland’: writing the dilemmas of return in the Vietnamese American diaspora

Abstract

In what ways can refugees be both cosmopolitan and diasporic? This article juxtaposes published memoirs with material from ethnographic research in order to analyse the discursive frameworks through which Vietnamese Americans of the 1.5 generation negotiate both diasporic imaginaries and cosmopolitan aspirations. The collective memories of the Vietnam War that circulate in the Vietnamese American diaspora place obstacles in the path of a younger generation who aspire to be cosmopolitans, but are entangled in memories of the trauma and dislocation of the war and must also respond to a pervasive ideology of anti-communism, which is a form of anti-cosmopolitanism, among the first generation. This case study points to the ways in which our current scholarly efforts to expand ideas of both diaspora and cosmopolitanism to include a variety of positions and aspirations can benefit from more attention to the modes of cultural expression produced by the populations we study.