The notion of transnational citizenship emphasizes the mobility and flexibility of transmigrants with respect to the affective claims and disciplinary operations of the nation-state. Such representations tend to make redundant the analysis of the deep commitments of time, acculturation, and identification that have traditionally been considered the sine qua non of national belonging. I shall aim to put these modalities of citizenship into a more dialectical relation by arguing that in order to reap the full benefits of their mobility, that is, to be able to secure the highest rates of conversion for their transnational cultural capital, transmigrants must legitimate their claims to national membership by accumulating practical national belonging. These issues will be explored through an ethnographic analysis of the strategies by which overseas Vietnamese attempt to assert and accumulate legitimacy as subjects of national belonging in Vietnam. TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY AND NATIONAL BELONGINGOne of the effects of the "transnational turn" has been to shift our attention away from the grand narratives of national belonging towards the processes by which globalization replaces deep attachment to the nation-state with a more flexible, mobile, and cynical relation. Although this has been a necessary and enabling theoretical step, it entails the risk of throwing the baby of national belonging out with the bathwater of "classical" national citizenship and identity in our conceptualization of transnational subjectivities. The transmigrant's mobility offers, no doubt, a freedom of sorts, but its liberatory potential has often been overstated. One is reminded of Bourdieu on the "California sports" (skiing, hang-gliding, windsurfing, etc.), which are attractive precisely because they offer a sense of "social weightlessness," "a sort of dream of social flying, a desperate effort to deny the gravity of the Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 01:48

This paper explores the pedagogic practices by which Overseas Vietnamese elites seek to enlist the young in a shared conception of Vietnamese identity in the context of a martial arts organisation. It shows how the contradictory principles of gerontocratic and meritocratic social structuration, identified in the Vietnamese system of person reference, are given embodied form in the school's practice. The paper concludes with a reflection on how incorporation into this habitus and the relation to the Vietnamese body it offers may act as a defence, albeit an ambivalent one, against classifications of the Vietnamese body as abject emanating from the host society.

In the wake of reform in Vietnam and the end of the cold war, overseas Vietnamese are returning to their former homeland in increasing numbers. For most of the first generation in the diaspora, memories of wartime Saigon are now being augmented by a touristic experience of contemporary Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. This essay asks how the co-presence of these differently spatialized and temporalized ways of knowing the city affects the production and consumption of images of Saigon in overseas Vietnamese communities in the West. Based on media ethnography carried out in Vietnamese households in Sydney, the paper argues that changes in the way Saigon is represented in overseas Vietnamese popular culture reflect a shift in the larger politics of diasporic identity. While narratives of exile and refugeehood remain potent forms of affective (if not instrumental) politics in overseas Vietnamese contexts, transnational forms of consciousness and identification are beginning to enter into diasporic public culture, albeit in a highly contested way.

No abstract

This paper seeks to understand the patterns and experiences of migration from a subsistence rice-farming village in Quảng Nam Province. Emigration from Bình Yên ranges from circular and seasonal migration to the cities and central highlands for construction, forestry and plantation work; semi-permanent migration to Đà Nẵng and the south for work in the manufacturing and service sectors; and more permanent migration to Hà Lam, Tam Kỳ, Đà Nẵng, Hồ Chí Minh City and elsewhere for education, trading, business, and professional employment. In addition, people from Bình Yên have engaged in assisted settlement migration to frontier zones in Đắk Lắk Province since the time of the Ngô Đình Diệm regime. By examining migration from the perspective of the village, the paper aims to illuminate the central Vietnamese peasant experience of the policies and socioeconomic conditions that have driven some of the nation's major migratory movements. The authors also map the social geography that ties members of the Bình Yên diaspora back to the village and to each other. Emigrants participate in the cash economy and endure alienated social relations in the cities and factories. When they return to Bình Yên they return to a world of tradition, warm social ties and a moral economy. Given this relationship, the paper asks, how do Bình Yên's locals and emigrants conceptualize their places in the socio-spatial “constellation” that connects the village to the locations in which its members have settled or found temporary work?