Vietnam, a War, Not a Country

Vietnam: A War, Not a Country explores the conflicting ways in which the American-Vietnamese War has been collectively remembered and represented from the perspective of the war’s three primary belligerents: the Vietnamese communists, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans. The book examines how the three different collectives memorialize this traumatizing historical event. Within each of these three groups there exists a number of competing narratives, generating not only a sense of shared meaning and community, but also impassioned social conflict. In order to trace these narratives within each collectivity, the authors develop the concept of arenas of memory, distinct discourses that are tied to specific individuals, organizations, and institutions that advocate specific narratives through specific forms of media. Their analysis leads them to make the case as to whether each of these societies experienced a cultural trauma as a result of the way in which the war is remembered.

Professor Ron Eyerman (Yale and Lund University) is the author of Is this America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma (University of Texas Press, 2015); Memory, Trauma and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); and The Making of White American Identity (Oxford University Press, 2022). Todd Madigan is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of works on cultural trauma and the role of narrative in social life. Magnus Ring is a senior lecturer in sociology at Lund University. He has conducted research on social movements and collective protests, concept formation of ＂social movement＂, welfare transition processes and on experiences of becoming ＂a dependent subject＂ among elderly in France and Sweden. Recent research is about representations of war and atrocities in public official spaces.