Comparing War Stories: Literature by Vietnamese Americans, United States-Guatemalans, and Filipino Americans

In the dominant U.S. imagination, Vietnam, Guatemala, and the Philippines are often conflated, distorted, or forgotten. Comparing War Stories situates these spaces in relation to each other through the literature produced by minority writers of Vietnamese, Guatemalan, and Filipino descent. This project aims to look at these places comparatively, with particular attention to the history of U.S. imperialism---particularly the history of U.S. counter-revolutionary campaigns---as the framework that links Vietnam, Guatemala, and the Philippines, together. My work focuses on literary representations of war and warfare in Vietnam, Guatemala, and the Philippines from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. I pay particular attention to the way in which writers of Vietnamese, Guatemalan, and Filipino descent confront and engage the dominant history of counterrevolutionary wars, guerrilla warfare, and the U.S. role in these armed campaigns. In addition to histories of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary wars in the homeland, I examine how U.S. minority writers of Vietnamese, Guatemalan, and Filipino descent narrate experiences of migration and marginalization in the U.S. and how these conditions are impacted by struggles in the homeland. This dissertation seeks to ask the following questions: In what ways do Vietnamese American, U.S.-Guatemalan, and Filipino American writers narrate experiences of war, migration, displacement, and marginalization? What similarities and differences can be found in their representations of these conditions? What does a comparison of the literature by these three groups offer to understandings of colonialism, neocolonialism, war, history, memory, violence, and struggle? In examining the literature by Vietnamese American, U.S.-Guatemalan, and Filipino American authors, I argue that these texts suggest that the role of war and warfare in U.S. imperialism is not uniform and that the place of war and warfare within immigrant communities produces different meanings.