Race, Resilience, and Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans

This book examines the lives and experiences of Vietnamese Americans in Louisiana, to highlight novel aspects within the politics of race in the USA. In doing so, it considers Vietnamese Americans’ conformity to white supremacy. Following more than 35 years living in the country of settlement, the book unpacks how Vietnamese Americans developed experiences of living with African Americans, the majority population in New Orleans. By engaging in a discussion of the white supremacist ideology, the book points out that Vietnamese Americans are not only victims of both overt and covert racial discriminatory acts, but they are also often complicit in it. Indeed, while they suffer minority status in American society, they buy into the racial hierarchy of white supremacy that simultaneously denigrates low-income African Americans. Engaging in a global perspective in which the nation-state has tried to embrace its overseas population as an essential part of the country, the book concludes by examining the effectiveness of the deterritorialization policy of the Vietnamese government on Vietnamese Americans. It also shows that while the deterritorialization policy failed to achieve its aims, it—unexpectedly—became a key factor that renewed the diasporic dimension of Vietnamese Americans. In addition, when fighting against the intrusion of the communist agenda into their diasporic community, Vietnamese American community leaders strategically employed the freedom in American politics to legalize and implement their local anticommunist agenda. In this process, while the diasporic moments were reinforced, the white supremacy remained intact. A rich and fascinating treatment of unique racial politics in the American deep South, the book is a must-read for scholars and students working in Asian identity politics, race and ethnicity studies, and American culture.

NGUYEN Vu Hoang is an anthropologist specializing in the Vietnamese diaspora and cultural dynamics in Southeast Asia. He received his Master's degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. His doctoral research, which forms the basis for this book, is a landmark study on the complex relationship between Vietnamese Americans and their homeland. Dr. Nguyen’s work provides a compelling analysis of the Vietnamese people's experience in New Orleans following the Vietnam War. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, he critically examines how this community navigated a racialized society, revealing a nuanced perspective on identity, racial stereotypes, and conformity to the broader "white racial frame" in the United States.
Before his current role as Deputy Dean of the Department of Anthropology and Religious Studies at the VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Hanoi, Dr. Nguyen held research positions at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (2005-2019) and the Institute of Cultural Studies (2019-2020). There, he contributed to the museum's collections by conducting extensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Brunei, and Laos. Dr. Nguyen is an active scholar who looks forward to collaborating with researchers worldwide.