(Re)making the South Vietnamese Past in America

This article views Vietnamese anticommunism as a historical institution designed to bolster the legitimacy of the Republic of Vietnam, and argues that political and violent aspects of South Vietnamese nation-building continue to shape and influence contemporary Vietnamese American politics. It explores the rise and decline of the underresearched Homeland Restoration (Phục Quốc) movement, which dominated Vietnamese American politics during the 1980s. It demonstrates how this movement shaped the contours of Vietnamese American politics and aided the consolidation of anticommunism as the dominant form of community politics. By binding cultural politics of Vietnamese Americans to concrete historical processes, this article illustrates the need for the scholarship on Vietnamese Americans to integrate issues of power, politics, and conflict into the analysis of diasporic and refugee collective memories.