Vietnamese Literature in the Diaspora

Examining Vietnamese diasporic literature as a critical site for understanding memory, identity, and cosmopolitanism from below, this book repositions Vietnamese literary writings as a form of cultural and political engagement.

Through literary and media works by Vietnamese writers across the United States, France, Germany, and Australia, the authors trace generational shifts from South Vietnamese exile and first-generation writers, to 1.5- and second-generation authors. They examine how war, migration, and historical rupture shape identity and ethical life across diasporic contexts, and offer the first sustained cross-national and cross-generational study of Vietnamese diasporic writing as a lived practice of cosmopolitanism from below. The book also shows how storytelling becomes a way of negotiating conditions of displacement, in turn challenging dominant understandings of cosmopolitanism grounded in elite mobility, or seamless global belonging. Memory functions not as restoration but as ethical positioning shaped by loss, nostalgia, witness, or, at times, as something that must be partially resisted or forgotten in order to survive.

Intended for scholars and students in Asian Studies, Migration and Diaspora Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, the book offers new insights into Vietnamese diasporic literature and broader debates on memory, identity, and cosmopolitanism.