Private desires on public display: Vietnamese American identities in multi-mediated leisure and niche entertainment.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the formation of Vietnamese American identity through cultural production. It contends that the circulation of images of transcendence in the performance of diasporic Vietnamese identity on public stages and through niche media channels simultaneously produce and reproduce immigrant desire while enabling new ways of envisioning post-refugee Vietnamese culture in exile. Paying particular attention to under-theorized, seemingly frivolous cultural sites of leisure and entertainment, this research project analyzes live music variety shows and videos, beauty pageants, Internet websites, and other cultural productions created by and for Vietnamese Americans. Because these sites of the 'popular' are repositories for generative forms of prevalent desires and fantasies, they appeal across gender and class lines to a mass Vietnamese diasporic audience. Departing from existing scholarship on Vietnamese refugees and immigrants that overwhelmingly focuses on the psychological traumas of displacement, resettlement, and adaptation, this work investigates simultaneously conflicting processes of assimilation, cultural preservation and invention, alongside gendered and classed dimensions of ethnic identity. Critical of the discourses that surround the figure of the refugee, this dissertation situates Vietnamese Americans as subjects formed through U.S. ideology and imperialism. Introduced and exposed to American democratic ideals and consumer capitalism before migrating to the imperial center, Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States with desires to live the American Dream. Public displays of these desires through mediated technologies and cultural production, dramatize the community's struggle to define itself against the legacy of the refugee label that continues to pathologize their experiences in American society and reconcile the tensions they encountered as racialized and classed minority subjects. The formation of contemporary Vietnamese American identities therefore rests simultaneously on resisting the refugee image as well as constructing a middle class ethnic identity under consumer capitalism.