A Rumor of Redress: Literature, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Reconciliation.

摘要

Recent years have seen the emergence of reconciliation as a primary pursuit and dominant trope in the literature surrounding the Vietnam War, marking a literary and cultural shift from the diagnosis of rupture and internal division in the literature during and immediately following the war. This dissertation examines the literature of reconciliation surrounding the Vietnam War and also the disruptive literature of irreconciliation emerging out of that same conflict. Examining the differing and often discordant views of the war and its legacy, I analyze the divergent practices, premises, and stakes of representing reconciliation in the wake of normalization of U.S.-Vietnam relations in 1995. The literature studied in this dissertation includes experiential narratives of return by U.S. veterans, poetry by northern Vietnamese veterans, legacy narratives by the second generation sons and daughters of U.S. vets, and poetry by diasporic Vietnamese writers. Drawing on literary and cultural studies on the Vietnam War, trauma and memory studies, and diaspora and transnational studies, my dissertation performs a model of critical comparativism that maps the transnational contexts of cross-cultural production and at the same time explicates the local figurative sites of reconciliation in literary texts. This dissertation challenges the idea that reconciliation in the case of Vietnam is about greater cultural and historical understanding of opposing perspectives and experiences surrounding the war. Instead, the literature of reconciliation recuperates American and Vietnamese national identities and their normalizing narratives to the exclusion of southern Vietnamese historical and cultural perspectives on the war. Consequently, my dissertation considers the resistance to reconciliation from diasporic Vietnamese writers whose work gives witness to the historical injury and loss of the southern Vietnamese past, but also gives testimony to the ambivalent results of economic liberalism and capitalist globalization of contemporary Vietnam. These irreconciled voices further complicate, contest, and expand what reconciliation means and for whom.