The American Dream in Vietnamese (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816665709)

In her research on popular culture of the Vietnamese diaspora, Nhi T. Lieu explores how people displaced by war reconstruct cultural identity in the aftermath of migration. Embracing American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism prior to arriving in the United States, postwar Vietnamese refugees endeavored to assimilate and live the American Dream. In The American Dream in Vietnamese, she claims that nowhere are these fantasies played out more vividly than in the Vietnamese American entertainment industry.
Lieu examines how live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, and Web sites created by and for Vietnamese Americans contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity. She shows how popular culture forms repositories for conflicting expectations of assimilation, cultural preservation, and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic and diasporic identity.
The American Dream in Vietnamese demonstrates how the circulation of images manufactured by both Americans and Vietnamese immigrants serves to produce these immigrants' paradoxical desires. Within these desires and their representations, Lieu finds the dramatization of the community's struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label, a classification that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society.

Author: Nhi T. Lieu
ISBN-10: 0816665702
ISBN-13: 9780816665709
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2011
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2012
Reference and Research Bk News 06/01/2011 pg. 45