“Without the Luxury of Historical Amnesia”: The Model Postwar Immigrant Remembering the Vietnam War Through Anticommunist Protests

Abstract

This article examines how postwar Vietnamese American immigrants are positioned as authoritative sources in public practices of remembering the Vietnam War, in this case, through street protests. It proposes that protest rhetoric can function as an effective form of disciplining ethnic identity and the social recognition of that identity. More specifically, Vietnamese American anticommunist protest rhetoric attempts to control and police the ways in which Vietnamese American identity can be forged in relation to the Vietnam War.This distanced Vietnamese American identity from ongoing conversations about race and nationality, and this constituted American citizenship of postwar immigrants as conservative. In short, this article will propose that the postwar Vietnamese American immigrant citizen-subject figures as the model minority of American imperialism.