diaCRITICIZE

"Sometimes people have said that I give voice to the voiceless Vietnamese. If you know anything about Vietnamese people, you know they are not voiceless. They are quite loud, whether it is in Vietnamese or English. Here is a reading list of some of the most important writing by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, just to prove that we have not been voiceless. Most of the time we are just not heard."

What does it mean to be Vietnamese? diaCRITICS editor Viet Thanh Nguyen says maybe it's time to ask another question. (diaCRITICIZE essay "on (not) being Vietnamese" translated into Vietnamese)

diaCRITIC Julie Thi Underhill reflects on Mark Wahlberg's rise to fame as a rapper, actor, and media mogul after his anti-Vietnamese hate crimes committed in Boston, in the city's largest neighborhood of Dorchester, as a teenager.

I rarely talk about politics over the holidays, but I had a heated conversation over Thanksgiving dinner about Ferguson with an in-law (a southern white man of libertarian convictions, pro-responsibility but also anti-cop, would never consider himself racist, especially as he is partnered with a Vietnamese woman and the father figure for her sons)...

…Granted, the academic interest in Chăm history and culture, exemplified by recent conferences held in HCMC and Phan Thiết, shows that we are still "on the map" for some scholars, even as we sometimes disappear within the "family" of Việt Nam rubric whereby no indigenous peoples are recognized as such, by the current government.

In this exclusive new diaCRITICIZE, Julie Thi Underhill offers an in-depth introduction to the sometimes fraught relationship between Chăm Americans and Vietnamese Americans. She raises difficult questions, including why Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans would rather forget the conquest of the Chăm, the continuing existence of the Chăm people, and whether or not the Chăm can be compared to Native Americans.