ETHN 189-Comparative Southeast Asian American
Histories, Identities and Communities
Winter 2008
Professor Yen Le Espiritu
Office: SSB 228
Office hours: Weds. 11-1; Thurs. 11-12
Office phone: 858-534-5206
E-mail: yespirit@weber.ucsd.edu
Required Texts:
1) Adelaida Reyes. Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience: Songs of the
Caged, Songs of the Free. Temple UP, 1999.
2) Anne Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child,
Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1997.
3) Aihwa Ong. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. UC
Press, 2003.
4) Course Reader – On E-Reserve
Course Requirements:
1) Attendance and active class participation
2) Art Project: Be as creative as you would like, using music,
poetry, photographs, painting, sculpture, collages . . .
We will exhibit these projects at the Ethnic Studies conference March 5-7
3) Midterm (Take-home): Due date: Feb. 7
4) Final (Take-home): Due date: Scheduled final exam date
20%
25%
25%
30%
Part I. Of War, History, and Memory
“One does not become recognizably human until one acts in one’s history.
And for that, one needs to have history.”
Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong
Week 1. January 8 and 10 – History and Memory
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations.
edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken
Books 1969, pp.243-256
Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 2001. “Situating Memory.” Pp. 1-17 in The Country of
Memory:Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
Week 2. January 15 and 17: “The Vietnam War,” American Style
Mark Philip Bradley. Ch. 2, “Representing Vietnam: The Interwar American
Construction of French Indochina.” In Imagining Vietnam & America: The Making of
Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950. University of North Carolina Press, 2000
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship,” from When the Moon Waxes Red
(81-105)
Susan Jeffords, Ch. 1 from The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the
Vietnam War.
Michael Klein, “Historical Memory, Film, and the Vietnam Era,” in From Hanoi
to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (19-40)
Student Presentations—Screening brief excerpts of Platoon, The Deer Hunter, First
Blood and Rambo: First Blood II, or The Killing Fields
Week 3. January 22 and 24: Critical Perspectives on the Vietnam War
Bao Ninh. Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. Pp. 183-193.
Denise Ferreira da Silva. “A Tale of Two Cities: Saigon, Fallujah, and the Ethical
Boundaries of Empire.” Amerasia Journal, Vol. 31, no. 2, 2005, pp. 121-134.
Khatharya Um. “The ‘Vietnam War’: What’s in a Name?” Amerasia Journal,
Vol. 31, no. 2, 2005, pp. 134-139.
Nguyen-Vo Thu Huong. “Forking Paths: How Shall We Mourn the Dead?”
Amerasia Journal, Vol. 31, no. 2, 2005, pp. 157-175.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (2006). Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics
and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse. The New Centennial Review/Michigan State Univ.
Press. Vol. volume 6, pp. number 2.
Week 4. January 29 and 31– Toward a Critical Refugee Study
Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee
Subject in U.S. Scholarship.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 1:1-2 (2006): 410-432.
Yen Le Espiritu. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press
Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’” American Quarterly
58:2 (2006), pp. 329-352.
Guest speaker: Ma Vang, PhD student in Ethnic Studies
Note: Jan. 31 --Pass out take-home midterm (midterm will cover the first four
weeks of the quarter)
Week 5. February 5 and 7-- Life in Transit
Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, pp. 1-69
Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, Part I, pp. 25-65
Note: Midterm due Feb. 7
Part II. The Constructions of Refugee and Refuge
“Refugees are a people larger than their situation.”
le thi diem thuy
Week 6. February 12 and 14 – Culture and the Cultural Citizen
Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, pp. 70-175
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, pp.
3-118.
Special guests: Bao Phi and Bryan Thao Worra (February 12)
Week 7. February 19 and 21— Culture and the Cultural Citizen (cont.)
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, pp. 119-288
Monica Chiu. Medical, Racist, and Colonial Constructions of Power: Creating
the Asian American Patient and the Cultural Citizen in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit
Catches You and You Fall Down. Hmong Studies Journal, 2004-05, 5: 1-36.
Week 8. February 26 and 28— Ethnic Cleansing and Technologies of CitizenMaking
Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, Introduction, pp. 1-21; and Part II, pp. 69-167.
Week 9: March 4 and 6 – Ethnic Cleansing and Technologies of Citizen-Making
(cont)
Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, pp. 168-286.
Art Projects Due
Week 10. March 11 and 13 – The Politics and Poetics of Living with Ghosts
Yen Le Espiritu. “Critical Memory Work: The politics and Poetics of
Remembering the Vietnam War.”
Video: Monkey Dance