Week 6_Miguel Flores_ASA 150E

Transnationalizing Viet Nam reiterates the importance of globalization and how it mobilizes the movements of people from one space to another. Valverde underscored factors that help propels these movements; socially, culturally, economically, and politically all shares a role in redefining identities and reemergence of homeland in other environments. Rooted in historical notions of the reframing of Vietnamese Americans as members of the homeland and members of the U.S. society, the discourse captures the essence and flexibility of members in the diaspora and it entails an economy that pushes the boundaries of inquiry, knowledge-making, and participation in the formation and emergence of imagined communities. Vietnamese Americans were once considered by their homeland as foreigners, but now the social economy welcomes the duality of identities in Viet Nam and the United States. Despite the establishment of the diaspora in suburbia and metropolis, the initiation and recognition of cultural ideas, customs, and beliefs never left the confined spaces of home, it just reemerged in a new space of belonging. The conceptualization of home exists because of the people that call it home. The term Transnationalization reinforces the idea of transporting ideologies along with the movements of people. Establishing a home away from home relies heavily on the people who roam and utilize these constructed communities. In this process, a new set of hybrid culture emerges, and it constitutes the hybridization of meanings through the back and forth influences of culture from home and the host country.

            In this network and process of hyper-awareness on people, home, culture, and dual/multiple identities, Vietnamese Americans freely exercise their beliefs and treat their own little communities as remnants of home or memory of home. The politicization of the space becomes complicated in the acceleration of hybrid ideas. The protest against Madison Nguyen and the Hi Tek protest riot were critical moments in contemporary history that shed light on the lasting impacts of displacements and trauma from a nation that used to exist. As people in the community grasp the remaining memory of their lost nation, it perpetuates the notion of hyper-awareness in surveilling every work, art, practices, and behavior as possible oppositions that would destroy the last imprint of their idea of home. These only generate fear and ignorance in expanding and redefining symbolic images of home. A one-sided view puts a community at risk and borders outside entities that may benefit their established communities. The question we need to answer is how are we going to preserve the ideas of a lost nation while encouraging people in the community to angle their views differently when perceiving, for example, art and or representation of their burgeoning spaces?

Citations

“USA: VIDEO STORE ORDERED TO REMOVE PORTRAIT OF HO CHI MINH.”YouTube, uploaded by Associated Press, 21 July 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjIHe5VSHc4

Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. 2012. Introduction; Chapter 4-6.