Week 6_Joyce_Vea_ASA114

Source: The Orange County Register

In this week’s readings, cultural identity takes center stage as the topic. In Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora, he writes about two different positions of cultural identity: the Collective One Self and Who we Really Are. The former definition points to how a group of people with a shared ethnic background/ancestry are bound together by their collective history. This paints an image of a highly stable form of identity-formation. However, the second definition disagrees, arguing that cultural identity is unstable and is influenced by changes in culture, power, and history. It is the differences that make groups of people negotiate between the past and future, taking into account colonial histories and traumas. 

Though Hall exemplifies the diasporic Black community in the Caribbean to examine cultural identity, I think his concepts are also applicable to the Asian American diaspora. The conflicts Caroline Valverde highlight in Transnationalizing Viet Nam points to the validity of the second definition. The artist at the center of the controversy, Chau Hyunh, was attacked by many Vietnamese Americans for sewing together the North and South Vietnamese flags next to a pedicure basin. Hyunh, who was as raised communist, was not aware of the intense anti-communist sentiment among Vietnamese-Americans. This conflict drives home Hall’s point about cultural identity — it is unstable and it is the differences within a community that drive transformations.

Question: How has the Vietnamese-American perception of Huynh's art changed since it first debuted? Do second-generation Vietnamese-Americans hold similar sentiments as their parents regarding artistic depictions of communist ideology? 

References:

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural identity and diaspora." Diaspora and visual culture. Routledge, 2014. 35-47.

Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, culture, and politics in the diaspora. Temple University Press, 2012.