In this week's theme of Forgotten, Suppressed, Invisible Histories, Viet Thanh Nguyen in
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War exemplified the effects of having history erased, with no accountability or time to process the mental damage form the war. "Remembering becomes imbued with the dead, freighted with their weight, a risky and burdened act", ghosts were a common usage within terms of the aftermath of war. The haunting ghosts can be paired with the injustices that haunts them. The lack of accountability to the people who have not accounted for all the historical events and the deaths of so many people. However, an interesting perspective is that you "must confront these ghosts, or exploit them, or return to the fatal circumstances that made them. In doing so, the storyteller must take responsibility for her tale when she invokes the dead, instead of merely claiming artistic license". I doubt that Americans ever think about the spiritual realm when it comes to taking innocent lives, and how they rewrite their narratives and portray them as inhumane. Interestingly, Vietnamese Americans play a part of the problems of telling on and about ghosts. Due to their colonization, french colonial policies emerged onto the traditions of rewriting history. "the Vietnamese in America are a politically engineered demographic who posses much greater cultural capital than Cambodian and Laotian refugees". The Vietnamese American narratives are important due to how their voices has come to dominate the aesthetics of minority literature.
My question is that how are we able to get actual narratives and voices out? It's hard because a lot of people do not have access or the platforms to get their true stories out. So how do we as scholars help with that?
I found this picture interesting because it is:
"Indirect effect of endorsement of ethno-cultural conceptions of identity on support for minority rights."
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