Violence, Memory, and Vietnamese-Irish Identity

Abstract

In a celebrated essay written in 1916, Randolph Bourne introduced the concept of transnationality to a broad audience. His essay, Transnational America, was a powerful critique of US assimilationist thinking, especially the perceived failure of the melting pot to cohere hyphenated identities into a single national one. Throughout much of the twentieth century, migration scholarship focused on social mobility and the assimilation of ethnic differences to borrow from Marshall Sahlins, the melting pot operated by high-energy physics: the science of disappearance. But especially during the First World War, the melting pot was understood to be well and truly broken: German-American and Anglo-American identities were hardening against one another; traditionalistic and cultural movements were flourishing. For Bourne, however, this failure presented opportunities: