SÁCH MỚI : Memory Is Another Country – Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora

Giới thiệu Sách mới :
Memory Is Another Country – Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen (Author)

Nguyen, Nathalie Huynh Chau
Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2009). xii + 212pp. Bibliographical references and Index. 22 B&W Photographs. Hardcover $39.95. ISBN: 0-313-36027-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-36027-5

BOOK DESCRIPTION
Memory Is Another Country explores the experiences of Vietnamese refugee women since the end of the Vietnam War. This illuminating work is the first study to apply memory and trauma theories to a substantial base of oral narratives by Vietnamese women living in the West.

The act of remembering is a means of bringing the past alive and an imaginative way of dealing with loss. It has been the subject of much recent scholarship, and is of particular relevance at a time of widespread transnational migration. For refugees, memory acquires a particular power and poignancy, since the country that they remember is now lost to them. The memories of Vietnamese refugees have been moulded by their experience of diaspora, and many guard these memories with silence, a silence that relates not only to the departure from Vietnam and the exodus itself, but also to the impact of grief and the loss of family members.

Memory Is Another Country is a valuable contribution to the field of diaspora studies. Based on in-depth oral narratives collected from 40 Vietnamese women, it deals with themes both universal and specific to this diaspora: divergent memories in families, the significance of homeland, the return to Vietnam, cross-cultural relationships, intergenerational tensions, and the issues of silence and unspoken trauma among Vietnamese refugees.

Some 35 years after the war's end, its impact on those involved is only beginning to be understood. The narratives presented here offer an insight into the way Vietnamese women have dealt with loss and, more broadly, illuminate the experience of the wider Vietnamese diaspora - and of other refugees the world over.

TESTIMONIALS
“This path-breaking study not only a public voice to Vietnamese women who fled their homeland following the fall of Saigon in 1975, but explores the extraordinary resilience of the human condition amid the disrupture of war and the displacement of migration. Leading cultural scholar Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen examines the histories of women of the Vietnamese diaspora with unusual empathy, and her analysis of their many experiences – as mothers, daughters, workers and even soldiers – is nuanced and rich. Nguyen reminds us that the act of remembering serves to keep the past in the present, mediating personal and collective loss and suffering and empowering Vietnamese women as they have forged their new lives in another country. Compelling and reflective, I recommend this important book as essential reading for anyone interested in the processes of migration and memory more broadly, and the Vietnamese diaspora in particular.
--Kate Darian-Smith, Professor of Australian Studies and History, the University of Melbourne.

“A compelling and exquisitely written book. We learn from the narratives of Vietnamese women who recount memories of war and exodus about a collective vernacular history that is missing from official accounts. Women become custodians of suppressed and silenced stories in families and nations. Their personal narratives are eloquent and moving to read, bringing the past to life and supplying the detail and specificity that is a hallmark of narrative. Nguyen’s meticulous research and literary gifts provide a model for future narrative scholars: she sensitively comments on moments where stories in families converge and diverge, examines the close relationship between content (what is said) and form (how a story is structured), and she charts a course for contemporary theory about memory, narrative and trauma. I loved every page of this stunning book.”
--Catherine Kohler Riessman, Research Professor of Sociology, Boston College and Emerita Professor, Boston University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen holds an ARC Australian Research Fellowship at the Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. A graduate of the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, her previous books are Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel (2003) and Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women's Narratives (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier's Literary Award.