Displacing Kinship
The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production
- 216 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Displacing Kinship
The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production
About This Book
Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization.Second-generation texts illustrate how the children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma and a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past. Linh Th?y Nguy?n's analysis reveals that present experiences of economic insecurity and racism also shape these narratives of familial loss.Developing a theory of intergenerational trauma, Nguy?n rethinks how U.S. imperialism, the discourse of communism, and assimilation impacted families across generations. Through ethnic studies and feminist and queer-of-color critique, Displacing Kinship offers a critical approach for reading family tensions and interpersonal conflict as affective investments informed by the material, structural conditions of white supremacy and racial capitalism.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Displacing Kinship: The Trauma of Assimilation and the Affects of Empire
- 1. Attractive Families: Assimilation and the Sociological Containment of Race
- 2. Ambivalent Attachments: Orienting toward Family in Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do
- 3. “Like a Fucked Family”: Intergenerational and Queer Vietnamese Traumas
- 4. Embodying Memory and Remembering Race
- Epilogue: Shattered Relationalities, Fetishizing Trauma, and the Task of Representation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index