As contemporary postwar Vietnamese in Vietnam currently struggle with their identity in a post-colonial global world, Vietnamese living abroad have had to move beyond their identities as boat people, Viet Kieu, displaced persons and political refugees. An entire generation of young Vietnamese have grown up outside of Vietnam and face conflicting ties to their parents’ homeland. These Vietnamese are not quite assimilated in their host countries, and yet they search for an identity that reaches beyond Vietnam. They seek an identity that transcends the political and social boundaries of both their adopted land and the space occupied by the memory of a land that is no longer theirs. This panel will examine Vietnamese writers, artists, and filmmakers living in France and discuss how contemporary expressions of what it means to be Vietnamese extend beyond the borders of present-day Vietnam. Individual papers will include gender constructions in the novels of Linda Lê, reconstructions of Vietnam and globalism in the films of Tran Anh Hung and Lam Le, and deconstructions of the Vietnamese past in the paintings of Tran Trong Vu. While issues pertaining to the politics of displacement, transnational identities and contemporary notions of the body as a site for exile pertain to many groups in many countries, this panel will limit its focus to Vietnamese artists living in France due to the particular nature and historical circumstances surrounding the relationship between colonizer and colonized in a postcolonial world. Artists have long been the voices of social criticism and cynicism that prevails among people who feel unable to speak. The voices of Vietnamese in France have not often been heard and this panel hopes to bring to light some of the conflictual notions of identity in exile and the cultural production of national versus transnational imageries.

Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California

Lam Le’s first feature film, Poussiere d’Empire (1983), inaugurated a trend in "French Cinema" that I have dubbed the Franco-Vietnamese "Nouvelle Vague." Poussiere d’Empire was the first "international" film allowed to be shot on location after the end of the Vietnam War, paving the way for such films as Regis Wargnier’s docu-drama Indochine (1992), Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1992) and more recently Tran Anh Hung’s postmodern rumination Cyclo (1995). The aim of this presentation is to resituate Lam Le’s foundational cinematic text within an emerging Franco-Vietnamese cinematic tradition distinct from both French cinema and "mainstream" Vietnamese cinema, a cinema still controlled by the socialist government of Vietnam, which remains, to this day and in spite of reforms introduced by Doi Moi, the Vietnamese glasnost, very much a cinema of propaganda. This paper examines how Lam Le interrogates the complex stakes in the encounter between France and Vietnam, translating them into a new cinematographic language that is also "an insurgent of cultural translation" (Bhaba). I contend that Lam Le cannot be simply seen as the fragile bridge between the new Vietnamese cinema and the French cinema, between Communist Vietnam and the exiled diasporic community living in the West, between the sacred and the profane, but more importantly, a postcolonial "auteur" whose film is a major contribution to our understanding and theorization of the postcolonial condition, a foundational text for the emergence of the Franco-Vietnamese Nouvelle Vague.

Mark Bradley, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This paper locates Tran Anh Hung’s 1993 film, The Scent of Green Papaya, in a transnational cinematic dialogue between Vietnamese filmmakers in France, Vietnam, and the United States that draws upon a pastoral idiom to re-envision the meanings and bounds of national space. Hung’s film, set in 1950s Saigon, evokes the everyday life in a single household in intimate and often naturalistic detail. The film’s remembered past is entirely disconnected from the turbulent political events of the period and the grittiness and tensions of the urban life of which the household is necessarily a part. But these departures from "reality" only reinforce its insistence on familial ties and the natural world as the mainsprings of Vietnamese identity. In the more recent Three Seasons by the Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui, the urban world is more fully realized. But the film’s visual style and sensibility and the interior realm of one of its young protagonists evoke a naturalized world of moral purity that stands in sharp contrast to the images of greed and licentiousness that the film ascribes to much of contemporary urban Vietnamese life. The imagined and naturalized homes in both Hung and Bui’s films also resonate with the works of Vietnamese directors in Vietnam itself, like Dang Nhat Minh’s 1995 film Nostalgia for the Country (Thuong nho dong que), whose own dissatisfactions with contemporary society are often expressed in a revalorization of rural life. Through a close analysis of the symbolic and visual language of these three films, this paper explores the significance of these pastoralized conceptions of home and the increasing engagement of the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) in contemporary efforts in Vietnam to articulate a vision of national community.

Nora A. Taylor, Arizona State University

In January 1997, the painter Tran Trong Vu returned to Vietnam to tend to his father’s funeral. His father, the poet Tran Dan, jailed in the 1950s for his supposed anti-communist writings, had been banned from publishing any of his works until a few years before his death. Tran Trong Vu had lived in Paris since 1989, and when he arrived in Vietnam, the authorities seized his passport and held him for several hours of questioning. This experience, in combination with his father’s death, was cathartic. It was the moment when he realized that his and his family’s conflictual relation with the government of Vietnam would not cease with the death of his father. Vu was eventually allowed to see to his father’s burial and return to France but he was also able to incorporate into his painting and installation work the bitterness and irony of his father’s predicament. Far from the pretty pictures and happy images that are found in the increasingly international art world of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, works from artists such as Vu living in France, capture the tensions between art and politics in and out of Vietnam. Refusing to be categorized as a "Vietnamese" or a "French" artist, Vu has chosen to take over his father’s sharp tongue and cynical imagery and make visual a Vietnamese world that is repeatedly silenced by the authorities. In using Tran Trong Vu’s works as case studies for critiquing the increasingly narrow definition of Vietnamese art, this paper will illustrate how Asian artists living in France have challenged traditional interpretations of "national" art while questioning Western perceptions of what it means to be an "Asian artist."

Jack A. Yeager, University of New Hampshire