TREADING THE BATTLEFIELDS OF MEMORY. “Vietnam” and “America” Fifty Years After
TREADING THE BATTLEFIELDS OF MEMORY. “Vietnam” and “America” Fifty Years After

Summary/Abstract: Marking fifty years since the Fall/Liberation of Saigon, this issueof Review of International American Studies revisits the intertwined historiesand memories of “Vietnam” and “America” through the lens of literature, visualculture, and transnational exchange. The introduction reflects on the enduringresonance of Hubert van Es’s 1975 rooftop photograph—an image thathas come to symbolize both the end of the Vietnam War and the beginningof a global struggle over its remembrance. As state-sanctioned and diasporicnarratives continue to diverge, Vietnam’s postwar landscape and its globaldiaspora reveal competing modes of memorialization: triumph and loss, exileand belonging, ideology and affect. The featured contributions trace how writersand artists—among them Marcelino Truong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, LanCao, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—reconfigure these contested memories throughnarrative, philosophy, and art. The issue underscores how the “American War”must be reframed as a Vietnamese and transnational experience, extendingbeyond national or temporal boundaries. Engaging with the “transnationalturn” in American Studies (Fishkin 2004), it argues that the afterlives of the warpersist in literature’s ongoing negotiation of trauma, identity, and reconciliation—revealing “Vietnam” and “America” as interwoven cultural constructson the ever-shifting battlefields of memory.

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