The Accumulation of National Belonging in Transnational Fields: Ways of Being at Home in Vietnam

Abstract

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

The politics of trans-national belonging: A study of the experiences of second-generation Egyptians during a period of socio-political change in Egypt

“…A useful example of this process comes from the work of Ashley Carruthers (2002) who studied the experiences of Australian-born people of Vietnamese descent (labelled as Viet Kieu) who returned to Vietnam for extended periods. Carruthers observed that 'domestic Vietnamese have an extremely finely honed capacity to spot a non-national, who is identifiable by the tiniest departure from locally constituted codes of dress, deportment, speech, and so on ' (2002: 431).…”

“…The pursuit of employment opportunities has been a feature of many studies of 'return mobilities' involving Western-born groups (Carruthers, 2002, Conway & Potter, 2009, Jain, 2013. In these cases, the second generation is not only able to utilise forms of cultural capital, associated with a Western passport and education, but take advantage of the social capital provided by family and kinship ties.…”

Mémoires migrantes, mémoires vivantes

“…Cette souplesse a sans doute aidé nos aînés à accepter le fait que le contexte migratoire qui est maintenant le leur les obligeait à modifier certaines pratiques liées à leur identité culturelle (sur la migration de la culture vietnamienne, voir, entre autres, Carruthers 2002et Thomas 1999. Tout en reconnaissant ces modifications (indépendance grandissante des enfants à l'égard de leurs parents, privatisation et simplification des rituels, etc.…”

Connected and Disconnected in Viet Nam: Remaking Social Relations in a Post-socialist Nation

“…3 The comparative literature shows that return migration may, in some instances, be viewed as the outcome of a failed migration strategy or, conversely, as satisfaction of one's original economic or cultural goals (Cassarino 2004:255). Return migration may enable one to reinvest one's migratory earnings in a place where one has a comparative advantage, or convert them into forms of social or cultural capital that may not be attainable in the migratory destination Carruthers 2002). Some studies emphasise the factors that 'push' migrants to return home: the hardship and stress of life as a migrant; poor health or personal crisis; or the legal, institutional, and cultural obstacles to integration in the migratory destination (Brettell 2000:100).…”