Revisiting South Vietnam: On Battlefield Tourism in “The Americans” and “Fatherland”

Abstract

Although the Vietnam War has officially ended, the battle over memory persists. In The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen offers a transnational perspective on the shaping and contestation of collective memories between the U.S. and Vietnam. Despite being defeated, America employs anticommunist ideology during the Cold War to assimilate the refugee community for its own purposes, creating a salvation myth of “freedom and democracy” and successfully revising history. In contrast, Vietnam is left to commemorate the revolutionary struggle against imperialism through museums, statues, and public cemeteries on its own territory, with South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians systematically erased from history. This homogenized social memory is affiliated with the tourism industry in the global operation of capitalism, further relegating Vietnam to the exotic, Orientalist “Other” struggling on the battlefield of memory.