Introduction: Projected Identities/Subversive Practices

Abstract

The events of the past two centuries have made “Vietnam” one of the early-twenty-first century’s most insistent cultural, imaginary, and discursive tableaux. Formerly it represented an object of colonial, personal, familial, cultural, and/or nationalist desire. Walked on, over, and through by some, inhabited and then abandoned, willfully or not, by others, it stands today in individual and collective psyches in France, the United States, Vietnam and its diaspora, as a lost object of desire. As such, it provokes an increasingly loquacious discourse on its subject, as writers, artists, and filmmakers attempt to capture and retrieve, finally and at long last, the essence of their respective objects of desire—Viêt-nam, Vietnam, Indochina. Shaped by these imagined contours, the patterns laid out by this prolix discourse on/of Vietnam reveal that even its most innovative representations continue to be shaped by strategies of division developed in the course of that country’s attempted conquests and defense. They show, that is, that Vietnam continues to be figured as a dividing space between past and present, East and West, colonial and postcolonial eras, natives and the diaspora. Caught in each particular community’s “past,” it remains divided from its peers, fragmented, unable to access the plethora of signifiers, identities, and productions that exists, and that will only be perceived in transcultural, transnational, and translinguistic dialogues.