LEADER 00000nam 2200421 4500
001 AAI3214055
005 20071029081246.5
008 071029s2006 eng d
020 9780542644665
035 (UMI)AAI3214055
040 UMI|cUMI
100 1 Beevi, Mariam
245 10 Surfin' Vietnam: Trauma, historical memory, and cultural
politics in 20th century literature and film
300 337 p
500 Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-
04, Section: A, page: 1326
500 Adviser: Gabriele M. Schwab
502 Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2006
520 This dissertation attempts to map a more complete picture
of trauma theories and traumatic recovery by shifting them
from traditionally psychoanalytic frameworks to a more
historicized cultural and political economic examination
of trauma in concretized experiences and moments of
intellectual and cultural production. Because trauma
discourse moves too seamlessly from studies of the
Holocaust and Hiroshima to the current AIDS crisis and the
aftermath of 9/11, I focus on the residual traumatic
recovery work around what is known in the global cultural
imaginary as "Vietnam"---both the nation-state and the
figure---as it signifies war, communist threat, the third
world, poverty and victimization, or as "the Vietnam
imaginary" embedded in our cultural subconscious. Through
the perpetuation of silences, misinterpretations,
repressions, and traumatic aftershocks in later political
historical events, we find a continuous re-opening of this
world historical wound
520 I analyze and compare the literary, filmic and academic
production of Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese culture
from three national contexts---Vietnam, France and the
U.S.---to reveal the diverse and difficult labors of such
social psychological and cultural recovery within and
across very different geopolitical and historical
specificities. I attempt to theorize the recovery work as
constant contestation against the traumatic effects of
dominant historiography, cultural memory, post-nationalism
and academic disciplinarity, especially as all these
influential factors continue to exert themselves on the
same territorial planes. Instances of post-socialist
reconstruction and diasporic cultural re-imagination by
both the mainstreams and the multiply displaced diasporic
Vietnamese resituate amnesiatic neo-liberal global
capitalist tendencies within the trenches of older
embattled historical landscapes and cultural mindscapes
520 Militarism and war, diaspora and globalization, community
and political activism, as well as intellectual
disciplining and cultural tourism, then, find themselves
implicated as mechanisms of traumatic repression. At the
same time, Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese engage not
as pathetically minoritized refugees and immigrants, but
as active cultural citizens and knowledge producers. Their
strategies, while sometimes complicit and otherwise
complicated by mainstream, traditional, and historical
obstacles---media, historiography, colonial memory, neo-
imperial education and nationalism---offer a glimpse of
alternative practices for overcoming the trauma of the
Vietnam imaginary
590 School code: 0030
590 DDC
650 4 Literature, Comparative
650 4 Literature, Asian
650 4 Literature, Romance
650 4 Literature, American
650 4 Cinema
690 0295
690 0305
690 0313
690 0591
690 0900
710 20 University of California, Irvine
773 0 |tDissertation Abstracts International|g67-04A
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