Historians, anthropologists, and literary critics examine the legacies of the Second Indochina War, or what most Americans call the Vietnam War, nearly forty years after the United States finally left Vietnam.

Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: National Amnesia, Transnational Memory, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War / Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini 11. Legacies Foretold: Excavating the Roots of Postwar Viet Nam / Ngo Vinh Long 162. Viet Nam and "Vietnam" in American History and Memory / Walter L. Hixson 443. "The Mainspring in This Country Has Been Broken": America's Battered Sense of Self and the Emergence of the Vietnam Syndrome / Alexander Bloom 584. Cold War in a Vietnamese Community / Heonik Kwon 845. The Ambivalence of Reconciliation in Contemporary Vietnamese Memoryscapes / Christina Schwenkel 1036. Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature / Viet Thanh Nguyen 1327. Viêt Nam's Growing Pains: Postsocialist Cinema Development and Transnational Politics / Mariam B. Lam 1558. A Fishy Affair: Vietnamese Seafood and the Confrontation with U.S. Neoliberalism / Scott Laderman 1839. Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy / Diane Niblack Fox 20710. Refuge to Refuse: Seeking Balance in the Vietnamese Environmental Imagination / Charles Waugh 24211. Missing in Action in the Twenty-First Century / H. Bruce Franklin 259Bibliography 297About the Contributors 313Index 315