Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora

Vietnamese diasporic relations affect and are affected by events inside Viet Nam.  In her recent book, Transnationalizing Viet Nam, Prof. Valverde explores these connections to convey a nuanced understanding of this globalized community.  She will argue that Vietnamese immigrant lives are inherently transnational.  Drawing on 250 interviews and nearly two decades of research, she will show how diasporic Vietnamese form virtual communities in cyberspace, organize social movements, find political representation, and engage in dissent—and how tensions based on generation, gender, class, and politics threaten to divide them.  Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching, research, and organizing interests include: Southeast Asian American history and contemporary issues, mixed race and gender theories, social movements, Fashionology, Aesthetics, Diaspora, and Transnationalism Studies. She authored Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. Professor Valverde founded Viet Nam Women's Forum (1996-2006), a virtual community with hundreds of women internationally that mobilized for change in Viet Nam and abroad, and Fight the Tower (2013), a movement to resist and demand justice against discriminatory practices directed against women of color in the academy. Professor Valverde was a Luce Southeast Asian Studies Fellow at the Australian National University (2004), Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2001-02), and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam (1999). As a passionate advocate for the arts, she curated the exhibit Áo Dài: A Modern Design Coming of Age (2006) for the San Jose Museum of Quits and Textiles in partnership with Association for Viet Arts, and consults for the annual Áo Dài Festival held in San Jose, California (2011-present). She is currently co-curating an upcoming exhibit (2015) for the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War.

Copies of Transnationalizing Viet Nam will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.