Week 7_Miguel Flores_ASA 150E

Nayan Chanda essentializes the importance of explicating histories, extending the narrative beyond the usual stories, in particular, the wars before and after the Viet Nam war. Along with a war narrative that underlines different turn of events, the author hints to its reader a proposition that extends the accounts of war by encouraging the readers to participate in knowledge-making and conjecture-making. The oversimplification of history degrades the legitimacy and authenticity of what happened during a specific period. Selecting stories of the war for the sake of oversimplification and or overgeneralization is a disservice to all those people who were part of the other side of the story. Chanda explicated the Indochina war and broke down, chronologically, what happened in terms of politics, culture, and economy. By incorporating his personal accounts, we see a different history that is often dominated by other accounts. In this class, we heavily discuss the importance of counternarratives and how it is providing and highlighting stories that are unaccounted for. Ethnic Studies, in general, engages in this process and encourages us as readers to unlearn what we learned in class. It challenges what we know, and it complicates our understanding of our own history.

While war narratives are important, personal accounts are also equally important. It puts everything in perspective and gives weight to the context of the story. Unaccounted stories also extend the current narrative that is in place. There were many wars that lead up to the Viet Nam war and there were also wars that happened after it. It is important to highlight these events as it plays a vital role in our understanding of the wars. Christian Jensen explained in his TED talk about the importance of personal narratives and how it underlines issues or premeditated situations that affect or contribute to the main narrative. As a question, how can we maintain a wholistic narrative? Why do oversimplify or select stories?

The video below is a project from David Guo of ASA 189E; it features the story of Eric Mar, a UC Davis Alumni and an amazing activist for Ethnic Studies. The video serves as a sample story that gives us a purview on how important it is to highlight personal stories to angle our positions in conceptualizing histories. It gives us an extension of a narrative.

Citations:

“Eric Mar | My Story with Asian American Study” YouTube. uploaded by David Guo, 2 August 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfjQU9tWjo

Nayan Chanda. Brother Enemy: The War After the War. 1988. Introduction; Chapter 1: Old Enemies, New War; Chapter 4: A Glimpse Into History, Epilogue.