Short description
A study that explores how the 'American War' is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam - in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. It analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, battlefield tours, and related sites of 'war tourism'.
Long description
Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the American War is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today - in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, battlefield tours, and related sites of 'war tourism'. In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.
Review
A significant achievement, and one that does much to demonstrate the complexity of sites of war memory... [Offers insights] that have an eerie resonance for today's political debates over the purpose and legitimacy of U.S. actions in the Middle East. Geoffrey White, University of Hawai'i
Table of contents
- AbbreviationsIntroduction: Remembering (in) VietnamPart 1. Reconciliatory Projects1. Return to Vietnam: Redemption, Reconciliation, and Salvation
- 2. Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photojournalistic Practices and Divergent Visual HistoriesPart 2. Memorial Landscapes 3. Commodified Memories and Embodied Experiences of War
- 4. Monumentalizing War: Toward a New Aesthetics of Memory Part 3. Incommensurable Pasts5. Contested Truths: Museums and the Global Politics of Objectivity and Representation
- 6. Tortured Bodies, Neoliberal Politics, and Historical Unaccountability Conclusion: Empires of Memory: Imperial Designs in a Neoliberal WorldNotes
- References Cited
- Index