Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay contemplates the multiscalar perspectives on memory and forgetting regard­ing the Vietnam War. It travels through the “country of memory,” a space materialized through multiple state narratives, personal experiences, representational images, activists’ history and constructed vignettes of their absences, to confront the political implication of enunciated forgetting in postwar Vietnam, in the refugee dia­spora, and under the US’s order of/to forget(ting).  Highlighting new cultural and liter­ary voices from the postwar generation in Vietnam, specifically Mai Huyền Chi’s docu­mentary 50 Years of Forgetting, and the significance of their locality, this essay delin­eates the complex relationship to silence among Vietnamese war survivors. Arranged in proses that are “bursts of remembering,” the essay interrogates various contexts and forms of state-sanctioned amnesia and official memory through a postwar gener­ational critique. In a blend of cultural and historical analysis and autobio­graphical offer­ing informed by the Third World radical traditions of ethnic studies, women of color fem­inism, and critical refugee studies, the essay gestures toward enunciating a relational mem­ory—a framework more capacious than existing national lexicons and designations—that continues to dream toward collective liberation and decolonized landscapes.