Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora

List of table x

List of contributors xi

Acknowledgements xvi

1 Vietnamese diasporas: An introduction 1

2 Documentary film memorialisation of Vietnamese indentured labour in France and New Caledonia: Sighting history 29

3 The post–World War II repatriation of immigrant Vietnamese workers: For the metropole or for the homeland? 46

4 The archipelago of camps: Between Vietnam and the diaspora 69

5 The Vietnamese diaspora in Germany: Refugees, contract workers and migrants 85

Frank Bösch

6 The Vietnamese diaspora in Japan: Refugees and internationalisation 104

7 A brief history of the Vietnamese diaspora in the UK: Migration, resettlement and social characteristics 123

8 Refugee histories and the COVID-19 pandemic: Second-generation Vietnamese Australians in the health professions 140

9 Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic: Busy entrepreneurs and their children 163

10 Food practices, transnational identity and belonging of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow: Nostalgic consumption 183

11 Navigating a postcolonial, capitalist and neoliberal world: A comparison of Vietnamese international students’ and migrant workers’ mobilities 201

12 Linda Lê: Migrant Writer M/other 219

13 The transdiasporic turn towards multiplicity in contemporary Francophone and American Việt Kiều literature 238

14 Memory Moments in Vietnamese American cultural productions 253

15 Ghostly brothers and spectral relations in Vietnamese diasporic literature 270

Catherine H. Nguyen

16 Diasporic Vietnamese metafiction of the 1.5 and second generations 292

17 Refugee memories in Vietnamese diasporic films 307

18 Reading for food in diasporic Vietnamese narrative cookbooks 323

19 The diasporic intellectual self-concept: The case of Vietnamese intellectuals in North America 343

20 Creating space for negotiations of experiences and knowledge for a more inclusive research practice in diaspora studies: The ‘in-between’ 361

Biography

Nathalie Huỳnh Châu Nguyễn is Professor of History at Monash University, Australia, and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA). Her research focuses on the Vietnamese diaspora and the experiences of refugees. A Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Oxford and former Australian Research Council Future Fellow, she is the author of four books including Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel (2003), Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives (2005) which was shortlisted for the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, 2010 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2009) and South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After (2016).

‘Nathalie Nguyen assembled an outstanding group of 20 international scholars for this impressive collection of essays on different aspects of Vietnamese diasporic experiences around the world. The essays show not only the complexities of Vietnamese diasporas but also how different these complexities are. They reveal a range of connections to Vietnam and to the countries where diasporic Vietnamese have settled. The images of losses, findings, adjustments and developments in the book challenge thought about a single Vietnamese diaspora.’

-- Professor Olga Dror, Texas A&M University

‘Essential reading for students of the Vietnamese diaspora, this volume reflects the multi-sided aspect of the subject, offering approaches that span history, anthropology, sociology as well as literary and cultural studies to form an account that is simultaneously wide-ranging and precise. It is also, perhaps more surprisingly, often movingly informed by personal emotion. Nathalie Nguyen’s editorial feat offers a model for a nuanced understanding of the complexities of diaspora, at times reading like a test case for wider issues such as compassion fatigue, forced repatriations, multi-generational memory and memorialisation.’

-- Professor Jennifer Yee, University of Oxford

"The Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora is a laudable effort that fleshes out several important topics.”

-- Tuan Hoang, Roundtable Review, Journal of Vietnamese Studies

“Nathalie Huỳnh Châu Nguyễn’s volume is an important contribution to understanding of Vietnam’s diasporas and the broader contributions of Vietnamese diasporic scholars and artists to a range of disciplines.”

-- Marguerite Nguyen, Roundtable Review, Journal of Vietnamese Studies

“An ambitious, carefully crafted, and timely collection, which pushes the contemporary scholarship on the Vietnamese diaspora to expand its geographical and temporal imagination ... and models a transregional and translingual approach that the field urgently needs.”

-- Y Thien Nguyen, Roundtable Review, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 

“The Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora is a timely intervention for a comprehension of the multifaceted sociocultural, political and historical developments from various Vietnamese communities in the past, present and future.” --- Tiến Minh Nguyễn, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal