The American Dream in Vietnamese

Displaced from Viet Nam by war and politics and arriving as refugees to communities in Texas and California, Vietnamese artists and entrepreneurs built forms of popular culture that affirmed connections to a Viet Nam that was and to a cosmopolitan culture that would incorporate Vietnamese subjects as equal participants. Nhi Lieu’s pathbreaking work of history & cultural studies The American Dream in Vietnamese traces the ways Little Saigons, video productions and beauty queen competitions built community and challenged the demeaning and orientalist meanings associated with refugees in the United States.

Nhi Lieu received her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies at UC San Diego and Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan. A widely published scholar, she is the author of The American Dream in Vietnamese (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), a pathbreaking work of history & ethnic studies that links popular culture to migration studies. She is currently working on a memoir on the body as an archive for four generations of women in her family.

Sponsored By:
Center for Diversity and Gender Studies
Center for the Study of the Southwest
Latina/o Studies Minor
College of Liberal Arts