Asian American Literature and the Vietnam War

Abstract

The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement are oftentimes discussed as foundational in the formation of Asian American political consciousness and representation during the late 1960s and 1970s. However, Asian American literature of that time offers very little engagement with the war or the anti-war movement. This chapter offers an overview of representations of the Vietnam War in Asian American literature and examines the possible reasons for the sparse representations of the war. In doing so, this chapter turns to an archive of ephemera: radical Asian American periodicals that represented the Asian American movement, and the first Asian American readers and anthologies, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971) and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976).