Roy Vu
History Professor, Dallas College - North Lake Campus
Irving, Texas, United States
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Roy Vũ earned his Ph.D. (2006) in history at the University of Houston. He is now a history professor at Dallas College, in Irving, Texas. He also serves as an Advisory Board member for Plant It Forward Farms and Foodways Texas. He is currently writing a book titled Farm-to-Freedom: Vietnamese Americans and Their Home Gardens, under contract for publication with Texas A&M University Press (forthcoming). He and his wife, Ngọc, reside in Irving, Texas.
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Our Southern Accents: How AANHPI Communities Reclaim and Reconstruct the U.S. South
This panel proposal centers the AANHPI experience in the U.S. South as the dominant literature often directs attention on AANHPI communities from the East and West coasts. From the St. Malo community of “Manilamen” in mid-eighteenth century Louisiana, the first permanent Asian American settlement, to the AANHPI resistance against anti-Asian racism amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2021 Atlanta Spa and 2023 Allen, Texas Mall Shootings, we focus on how AANHPI communities continue to shape the U.S. South by strengthening and preserving their communities while resisting and transforming what many people expect Southern culture to look, taste, and sound. Our accented tongues go beyond the Southern drawl and help build and change the U.S. South.
Our panel includes Dr. Elaine Cho, Lecturer, Department of Literature, at American University; Dr. Thao Ha, Sociology Professor at MiraCosta College; Stephanie Drenka, Denise Johnson, and Christina Hahn, Co-Founders and Creative Director of the Dallas Asian American Historical Association; and Dr. Roy Vũ, History Professor at Dallas College. We cover the range in which AANHPI communities reclaim and reconstruct the U.S. South. Are Asian Americans Southern enough? The answer is a resounding yes! Our histories, contributions, and presence speak for themselves. Despite a history of marginalization, erasure, and racial violence, we find ways to define and celebrate our Southern accents via cultural foodways, historical preservation, the arts, education, etc. AANHPI communities in the U.S. South have earned and deserved our greater attention and study.
Sculpting the Homeland: Memorializing the Việt Nam War and Refugee Spaces
In the post-Việt Nam War era, the Vietnamese diaspora has made a concerted effort to not only preserve, create, and memorialize public spaces in diasporic communities but also in former refugee detention camps to remember and honor those who once occupied these refugee spaces. Such memorialization efforts by Vietnamese Americans occur “here” in the United States, as well as over “there” in Việt Nam and overseas. Attempts to memorialize the defeated Republic of Việt Nam (more commonly referred to as South Việt Nam), are not a simple glorification of a deceased nation nor to weaponize memory, but rather to avert historical erasure of a nation and a people that remain largely ignored, diminished, marginalized, and misunderstood. For Vietnamese exiles and their strategic memory projects of constructing Little Sài Gòn communities, as well as museums and monuments to document their war and refuge, they would also memorialize their in-between spaces: refugee detention camps that were sites of despair and tragedy, but also hope and survival. Vietnamese Americans play a crucial, proactive role of memorializing their lived experiences of refuge. I will examine the memorials, monuments, and refugee spaces created and preserved by Vietnamese Americans. I hope to provide an engaging paper and PowerPoint presentation as to why these places are historic sites of sentimental importance and tangible value. Additionally, I wish to reevaluate the representation of home by considering these contested sites as liminal spaces of the re-imagined homeland.
Roy Vu
History Professor, Dallas College - North Lake Campus
Irving, Texas, United States
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