Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This study examines how Franco-Vietnamese artist Clement Baloup uses well-known images of the Vietnam War to introduce his graphic narrative on Vietnamese diaspora in the United States and challenge the dominant representation of the war and Vietnamese people. In particular, it discusses how Baloup’s Vietnamese Memories Book 2: Little Saigon offers nuanced recollection and reflection of the colonial history of Vietnam and its long-lasting impact on the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. Different from well-known graphic memoirs of the Vietnamese diaspora, Baloup’s book presents multiple and varied accounts rather than focusing on one single narrator and their family. The stories are structurally and stylistically different. This presentation examines how Vietnamese Memories draws a collective memory of trauma and injustice without erasing each individual narrator’s unique experience, how it prompts the reader to contemplate the common threads connecting the multiple narrators whose stories are situated in differing time periods, how the textual-visual narratives represent the intersection of personal memories of the Vietnamese diaspora and the socio-political history of Vietnam and the United States, and how the artist uses images as a way of resistance to the commonly known cultural representations of the Vietnam War such as Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph “Children Feeling South Vietnamese Air Force Napalm Attack on the Village of Trang Bang”.