Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: looking back at the Vietnam War / Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim -- Vietnamese refugees and Internet memorials: when does war end and who gets to decide? / Yen Lê Espiritu -- Broken, but not forsaken: disabled South Vietnamese veterans in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora / Quan Tue Tran -- What is Vietnamese American literature? / Viet Thanh Nguyen -- Viet Nam and the diaspora: absence, presence, and the archive / Lan Duong -- Liberal humanitarianism and post-cold war cultural politics: the case of Le Ly Hayslip / Jeehyun Lim -- Ann Hui's boat people: documenting Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong / Vinh Nguyen -- The deep black hole: Vietnam in the memories of Australian veterans and refugees / Robert Mason and Leonie Jones -- Missing bodies and homecoming spirits / Heonik Kwon -- Agent orange: toxic chemical, narrative of suffering, metaphor for war / Diane Niblack Fox -- Re-seeing Cambodia and recollecting the Nam: a vertiginous critique of the military sublime / Cathy J. Schlund-Vials -- Naturalizing war: the stories we tell about the Vietnam War / Brenda M. Boyle.

"Looking Back on the Vietnam War reflects on the half-century since the 1965 U.S. escalation of conflict in Viet Nam, asking what, how, and why we know about the Vietnam War. While the war in all of its complexities is written about from a number of disciplinary perspectives, those dominant narratives often tell a limited story, one often told in isolation from other disciplinary perspectives. Looking Back suggests we take stock of the stories absent from dominant narratives of the War, and that we do that stock-taking through the lenses of multiple disciplines and perspectives. Based on the idea that Vietnamese stories, both those set in the postwar Viet Nam and also in the Vietnamese diaspora, are crucial to understanding the Vietnam War, this volume brings together essays examining Vietnamese and diasporic conditions with those examining U.S. traces of the War. Looking Back also attends to the significance of the present in the act of recollecting as it reflects on the war's echoes in the current era of endless U.S. warring. The volume engages in a dual looking back--both in the sense of remembering and of reconsidering--to offer a fuller picture of the Vietnam War by showing the perspectives of groups and issues that have largely escaped serious attention in popular narratives of the war"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.