Vietnamese Diaspora in a Transnational Context : Contested Spaces, Contested Narratives

The Vietnamese diaspora is now a truly global diaspora. This collection, one of the first of its kind, traces the Vietnamese diaspora’s multifaceted roots in late 19th and early 20th century French colonialism, the end of the War in Vietnam, and economic migrations to fellow communist states in the 1970s and 1980s. Out of these migrations, Vietnamese communities have now formed in many of the major immigrant receiving countries around the world.

This collection traces the connection between the historically traumatic forms of dispersal from Vietnam and todays transnational Vietnamese communities. It considers questions about how conditions of exit from Vietnam shape Vietnamese diaspora identities and patterns of settlement and economic integration. It also addresses questions of how memory politics shape the ways in which various segments of the Vietnamese diaspora engage with contemporary Vietnam, and shape what is now an intergenerational diaspora.

Contributors are: Tamsin Barber, Gisele Bousquet, Tuan Hoang, Gertrude Hüwelmeier, C. N. Le, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Vic Satzewich, Ivan Small, Grażyna Szymańska-Matusiewicz and Anna Vu.

Anna Vu is a sociologist from Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on various aspects of the Vietnamese diaspora experience, both in Canada and globally. She has published articles on diaspora politics and identity formation, collective trauma and memory and commemoration. Her current project examines the issue of labour precarity in the Vietnamese nail salon industry.

Vic Satzewich is Professor of Sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He is past president of the Canadian Sociological Association. His most recent books include Points of Entry: How Canada’s Immigration Officers Decide Who Gets In(University of British Columbia Press, 2015) and ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Canada: A Critical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021).