This article examines the global afterlives of the Vietnam/American War through the intertwined lenses of photography, cinema, and Cold War cultural circulation. Beginning with Chris Niedenthal’s iconic 1981 photograph of an armored SKOT before Warsaw’s Kino Moskwa during martial law, the essay analyzes how a contingent act of witnessing became a visual allegory that re-situated the American War within Poland’s own history of repression. Drawing on Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum, it argues that the image’s enduring force lies in the tension between the photographer’s embodied immediacy and the mythological readings later attached to it. Juxtaposed with globally circulating images such as Eddie Adams’s ­“Saigon Execution” and Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl,” Niedenthal’s photograph becomes a case study in the transnational migration of wartime imagery and the asymmetries that structure public memory. The essay then turns to Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American, and Vietnamese-Polish literary and artistic archives, highlighting how these testimonies unsettle the dominance of American cinematic narratives that have long framed the war as an American psychological event rather than a Vietnamese historical catastrophe. The conclusion outlines a hemispheric and transoceanic framework for the Review of International American Studies, urging contributors to explore the war’s dispersed legacies as a shared, global archive of memory, representation, and resistance.

Marking fifty years since the Fall/Liberation of Saigon, this issue of Review of International American Studies revisits the intertwined histories and memories of “Vietnam” and “America” through the lens of literature, visual culture, and transnational exchange. The introduction reflects on the enduring resonance of Hubert van Es’s 1975 rooftop photograph—an image that has come to symbolize both the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a global struggle over its remembrance. As state-sanctioned and diasporic narratives continue to diverge, Vietnam’s postwar landscape and its global diaspora reveal competing modes of memorialization: triumph and loss, exile and belonging, ideology and affect. The featured contributions trace how writers and artists—among them Marcelino Truong, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Lan Cao, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—reconfigure these contested memories through narrative, philosophy, and art. The issue underscores how the “American War” must be reframed as a Vietnamese and transnational experience, extending beyond national or temporal boundaries. Engaging with the “transnational turn” in American Studies (Fishkin 2004), it argues that the afterlives of the war persist in literature’s ongoing negotiation of trauma, identity, and reconciliation—revealing “Vietnam” and “America” as interwoven cultural constructs on the ever-shifting battlefields of memory.

This conversation with French illustrator, painter, and author Marcelino Truong retraces his decades-in-the-making artistic journey with a special focus on the historical research informing it. The son of a South Vietnamese diplomat and a French mother, Truong has devoted a trilogy of graphic novels to Vietnam’s tumultuous recent past. The interview, conducted toward the end of 2023, specifically centers on his latest work, 40 Men and 12 Rifles, which recounts the First Indochina War through the eyes of a forcibly enrolled war painter. Among other things, Truong discusses his creative process, the complexities of his mixed heritage, and his motivations for giving a human face to the “other side.”

This interview features Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, an acclaimed Vietnamese author, poet, and translator, whose works explore themes of historical memory, the aftermath of war, and the resilience of family. The conversation delves into Nguyễn’s literary journey and her dedication to decolonizing narratives about Việt Nam. She discusses her novels, The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, both of which weave historical fiction with personal and national history. The interview highlights her approach to storytelling, blending Vietnamese traditions, autobiographical elements, and poetry, and her commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices. This discussion provides an insight into her creative process and the enduring relevance of her work.

This article discusses how Canada has appropriated the narrative of the Vietnam War to present itself as a progressive country. Specifically, it analyzes how the Land of Maple Leaf co-opted diasporic Vietnamese narratives to promote a nation-building project that exalted the country’s multicultural ideology and fostered its image as a peaceful kingdom. The article also examines how one of the first memoirs written by a Vietnamese Canadian, Thuong Vuong-Riddick’s The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam (2007), complicates our understanding of the diaspora by both enforcing and resisting dominant narratives that portray Vietnamese Canadians as emblematic victims and/or successful immigrants who are grateful beneficiaries of liberal freedom, democracy, and wealth.

This study examines the representations of Vietnam War trauma and the paths taken by the Vietnamese immigrants in the US at the collective level to heal their wounds in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm. Through the analysis of these literary works, the study intends to contribute to the efforts in the field of trauma studies that lay emphasis on the experiences of war survivors who seek refuge in Western nations. In both of Cao’s novels, although the trauma of the Vietnamese in the US is mostly related to their experiences of the war in their homeland, intolerance to the Vietnamese presence in the US, and thus, their marginalization by Americans, impedes the self-healing efforts of the Vietnamese. Despite the challenges they face in their homeland, on their journey to the US and in the US, the Vietnamese do not prefer a life of passivity; instead, they seek to heal their wounds in every possible way.

The article looks at the philosophy and practice of interbeing in the writing of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Each section discusses a selected aspect of interbeing as taught by Nhat Hanh and practiced by the Plum Village community. “Peaceful Revolution and Building a Community” section introduces a historical look at a collaboration between Nhat Hanh and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. “The Web of Relationships: The Net of Indra” explores the philosophical depth of the concept of interbeing and its roots in The Avataṃsaka Sūtra. “Interbeing” looks at how the term is applied in Engaged Buddhism. “Interbeing in Historical and Ultimate Dimension” develops some of the insights from previous sections and discusses the practical dimension of interbeing, with numerous references to Nhat Hanh’s books as well as his poems written during and after the Vietnam War.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2016) and Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone (2003) present apparently twofold perspectives on the Vietnam War, but—in fact—they are equally informative sources of dismal reverberations regarding both Vietnamese and American interpretations of the war events. Thus, they construct an unequivocal image of the war, which has turned out to be detrimental for both parties. In this paper, I investigate the liminal state of both protagonists in order to illustrate that the Vietnam War has proved destructive to either participating side. The authors of both novels provide apparently dissimilar portrayals of the war circumstances and its ramifications. However, after a closer examination, accounts which emerge from their narratives seem equally sinister and overwhelming. The concept of liminality, employed as a tool to illustrate the mental state of each protagonist, enables us to capture their “in-betweenness” and allows for investigating their inner passage. Such an approach opens more possibilities for interpretation, since there are interstitial spaces that need to be examined in order to define the characters’ transition. The conceptualization of a British anthropologist, Victor Turner, which inscribes into this theorization, appears indispensable for discerning certain shifts, translocations and transfigurations of the subject in a process of change.

In their work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer an analysis on the formation of political and economic structures in capitalist societies based on the interpellation of subjects via a system of controlling physical and psychological desires. Their analysis showcases how desire control produces effective labor in a capitalist system, creates psychological massification and achieves political hegemony in a community of interpellated subjects. For the machine of society to function properly, desire needs to be filtered and commodified, otherwise it threatens the system with revolutionary ruptures. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise, the concept of community relates Ruby (a small all-black town cut off from the rest of the world) and the sign of its ontological other, the Convent (a house for wayward women), with the history of racial conflict and the politics of gender. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of how desire politics affect community politics, I attempt to examine how both the interpellating and revolutionary functions of their respective “desiring-machines” lead the communities in Paradise either to decay or evolution. I propose a parallelism between the signs of Ruby and the Convent with the sign of the despotic body (as explained by Deleuze and Guattari) in an attempt to represent the distorting and unifying processes that transform the experiences of both communities. By exploring the restoring flow of desire represented in the dance of the Convent women, I draw attention to the revolutionary changes desire causes in both the physical bodies of the character subjects and the organless bodies of the two communities. As a final point, by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the body without organs to the symbolic spaces of the Oven and the Convent’s cellar, I highlight the linearity of the process of social-production via desire-production.

The article focuses on the discursive use of freedom in the context of neoliberal capitalism in Dave Eggers’ The Circle, A Hologram for the King and The Every. Taking into account the importance of this concept in the context of the American history and national identity, it argues that despite claims that this form of capitalism promotes freedom, it actually privileges economic freedom over personal and political liberties, leading to the rise of inequalities already prophesized by Alexis de Tocqueville. In this context A Hologram for the King emphasizes the discord between the promise of neoliberalism and its practical implementation, which reveals that rather than promote freedom, this form of capitalism establishes structural barriers that obstruct social mobility. With regard to The Circle and The Every, the article analyzes how the eponymous company draws on ideals of freedom in order not only to increase their revenue and monopolize the market, but also establish a digital panopticon that infringes on personal freedoms and privacy, even though the companies themselves operate in secrecy.

Giacomo Traina’s Reflections of War: History and Antirealism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Fiction (Ombre Corte, 2024) offers a timely and meticulous reassessment of the Vietnam War and its enduring postmemorial legacy. Framed through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s assertion that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” the study interrogates the competing historical, political, and cultural narratives surrounding the conflict, foregrounding the long-neglected Vietnamese perspective. Divided into two complementary sections, Traina’s volume first reconstructs the complex twentieth-century history of Vietnam, tracing the nation’s descent into war and its aftermath through a Vietnam-centric approach that restores the agency of Vietnamese actors and emphasizes the transnational and multilayered dimensions of the conflict. The second section offers a sustained analysis of Nguyen’s fiction—particularly The Sympathizer (2015)—through the theoretical framework of Critical Refugee Studies, illuminating how Nguyen’s antirealistic narrative strategies challenge imperial historiographies and expose the entanglements of memory, power, and representation within the American cultural imagination. By conceptualizing the Vietnam War as both a physical and metaphorical “war of Vietnams,” Traina situates Nguyen’s work within a broader genealogy of diasporic memory and cultural negotiation, wherein the “war after the war” continues to be fought through competing myths, counternarratives, and postmemorial reimaginings. In bridging historical reconstruction with literary analysis, Reflections of War not only enriches Italian scholarship on Vietnamese American literature but also lays the groundwork for further studies into the transnational reconfiguration of war memory, identity, and narrative form.

I review Gastropolítica: una mirada alternativa al auge de la cocina peruana (2023) by María Elena García, focusing on her interpretation of the Peruvian gastronomic boom as a historical process that, while pursuing national resurgence, maintains class, race and gender structures rooted in the coloniality of power. García explores the actions of gastropolitical elites and the subaltern subjects who develop forms of resistance and negotiation, while also considering interspecies relations. The collaboration between internationally renowned chefs and local food producers is often established in terms of inequality, reinforcing the racialization of indigenous and Andean peoples, as well as symbolic and economic violence against women.