Trauma and Memory in Vietnamese America: Anti-Communism, Authoritarianism, and Anti-Asian Violence in a Divided Community

Please join us for a panel discussion with:

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Professor, University of Southern California
Hoi Trinh, Human Rights Activist
Lan Cao, Professor, Chapman University
John Phan, Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Lien-Hang Nguyen, Associate Professor, Columbia University

On January 6, 2021, the former Republic of Vietnam (RVN) flag of the vanquished South Vietnam regime flew alongside the Confederate flag and other emblems of white supremacy on the steps of the Capitol. This panel, which includes Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, acclaimed human rights activist and lawyer Hoi Trinh, Law Professor and author Lan Cao, as well as Hang Nguyen and John Phan, will discuss the contested memory of the Vietnam War, the politics of the RVN flag in U.S. politics today, and the impact on US-SRV relations moving forward.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed. His other books are a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his six-year-old son, Ellison. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) at Columbia University.

Online via Zoom. Please register here.