ABSTRACT
Through a consideration of selected Vietnamese American works of literary fiction over three generational periods, this chapter examines the shifting articulations of memory and remembrance forms in diasporic cultural production and lived experience. With growing spatial and temporal distance from sources of diasporic origins and experiences of exile, memory is observed to be increasingly located and produced in frameworks of sensory stillness that evoke abstraction and fragmentation. Memory and its associated experiences and imaginaries are central to cultural and literary explorations and negotiations of individual, collective and generational identities, highlighting their contingencies and limits of representation. They also reorient attention away from material public memory contests that obscure more private and sensory forms of remembrance, forgetting and longing.
