PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Mimi Khuc, University of California, Santa Barbara:  mimikhuc@umail.ucsb.edu

This paper examines the Vietnamese American experience through the concept of “civil religion.”  I argue that this concept becomes useful to highlight Vietnamese American diasporic community formations and meaning-making strategies in the context of dominant American civil religious expression, particularly around the Vietnam War.  Vietnamese Americans not only carry the legacy of their own traumas intergenerationally but also must negotiate the dominant national imagination and memory as the Vietnam War continues to haunt the American nation.