The American War in Viet Nam: Cultural Memories at the Turn of the Century

The author examines different modes of memory in relation to the Vietnam War and how people remember and memorialize it and its aftereffects, in memorials, poetry, film, and fiction published or produced since the Persian Gulf War through the War on Terror, as well as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She draws on Alison Landsburg’s idea of prosthetic memory, a memory of a past event an individual did not experience, as well as theories of others, to develop an idea of collective cultural memory to show that transgenerational, transnational, and prosthetic memories of the war are shaped and reshaped in representations of it. She discusses poetry about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, including W.D. Ehrhart’s “The Invasion of Grenada” and “Midnight at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” Doug Anderson’s “The Wall,” Eugene Grollmes’ At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.: Between the Lines, and Lamonte B. Steptoe’s “A Second Wall”; the Vietnam Women’s Memorial; representations of the war’s psychological effects on American and Vietnamese civilian women in Sandie Frazier’s I Married Vietnam and Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth; the Vietnamese novels The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh and Novel Without a Name by Huong Thu Duong, as well as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Sidney Furie’s film Going Back; the film We Were Soldiers; Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux; Vietnamese American perspectives in diasporic literature, including Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Andrew Lam’s Perfume Dreams: Reflections of the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West, and Birds of Paradise Lost, and GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey; and the relationship between the Vietnam War and the War on Terror. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)