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e u r o p e a n j o u r n a l o f
Article
Corresponding author:
Jon Stratton, School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts,
Curtin University, GPO Box U1987,
Perth 6845, Western Australia, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
European Journal of Cultural Studies
14(3) 265–281
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549411400103
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Zombie trouble:
Zombie texts, bare life
and displaced people
Jon Stratton
Curtin University, Australia
Abstract
There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At
the same time, members of
western countries have become increasingly anxious about
displaced peoples: asylum-seekers
and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those

countries. What displaced
people, people without the protection of the state and zombies
have in common is that both
manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’.
Moreover, zombies have the
qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The
genre of the zombie apocalypse
centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge
for a group of humans. In these
texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with
displaced people who are ‘threatening’
the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people
constructs them as similar to
mythical zombies. This article includes analyses of a number of
zombie films including Shaun of
the Dead, Fido and Undead.
Keywords
asylum seekers, bare life, displaced people, Fido, Shaun of the
Dead, zombies
Introduction
This article is about the relationship between zombies and
displaced people, most obvi-
ously refugees, asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants. It is
founded on a realization that
the underlying characteristics of zombies are similar to those
attributed to displaced peo-
ple: that is, people predominantly from non-western states
striving for entry into western
states. The article begins from the recognition that during the
2000s there has been a tre-
mendous increase in the number of films released featuring
zombies. At the same time,

at CALIFORNIA ST UNIV NORTHRIDGE on March 1,
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266 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(3)
zombies have begun to appear in other media. A videogame
series called Resident Evil,
which includes biologically mutated flesh-eating undead,
founded a genre now called
‘survival horror’. Released originally for Sony PlayStation in
1996, by 30 September
2004 the various forms of the game had sold more than 25
million units (CAPCOM,
2004), and in 2002 it spawned a film also called Resident Evil.
The film became the four-
teenth highest grossing ‘R’ rated film in the USA that year and
the fiftieth highest grossing
film globally (Box Office Mojo, 2002). There are now two
sequels. In 2009, Quirk Books
released Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a ‘mash-up’ in which
author Seth Grahame-
Smith introduced zombies into Jane Austen’s 1813 romance
novel. The book became an
instant success. In April it had reached the third spot on the
New York Times bestseller list,
and by the end of the year it had sold more than 700,000 copies
(Merritt, 2009). Such was
the success of the revisioned novel that Quirk Books were
inspired to commission a pre-
quel, Steve Hockensmith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:
Dawn of the Dreadfuls.
During this same period, since the 1990s, there has been an

increasing anxiety in
western countries over the numbers of displaced people
attempting to gain entry across
their borders (the reasons for this are many, but beyond the
scope of this article). Certainly
there has been an overall increase in refugee numbers. One set
of figures released by the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tells
us that whereas in
1960 there were 1,656,669 people classified as refugees, in
2006 this had climbed to
9,877,703 (UNHCR, 2009). However, most of these refugees are
situated in countries
outside the developed West. Similarly, between 1980 and 2000
there was a significant
increase in asylum-seeker applications in Europe, from around
150,000 to around
450,000, with a spike to 700,000 in the early 1990s, and in
Australia and New Zealand
from virtually nothing in the mid-1980s to around 5000 a year.
In North America the
figure increased significantly in the mid-1990s to nearly
200,000, then declined to around
50,000 by 2000 (UNHCR, 2000). Anxieties over border
protection in all countries, but
especially in the West, were heightened in the wake of the 2001
attacks on the World
Trade Center in New York. The link between these anxieties
and concerns over displaced
people attempting to gain entry to western countries was made
in, for example, Children
of Men, which was released in 2006 and set in 2027. Directed
by Alfonso Cuarón, who
also co-wrote the screenplay, the backdrop to the film’s
ostensible concern with global
infertility is a Great Britain in which the increase in

unsanctioned immigration is such
that asylum-seekers are placed in cages on London’s streets,
and Bexhill-on-Sea on the
south coast has been turned into a massive detention camp (see
Stratton, 2009).
In this article I will be arguing that in many of the recent
zombie texts, the zombie threat
can be read in terms of the fears of many members of western
countries about being over-
whelmed by displaced people. What might be the justification
for this connection between
zombies and displaced people? The recent renaissance in
zombie films lifts off from the
revision of zombies in western popular culture that is traced to
George A. Romero’s now-
classic 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. This film began
what is now colloquially
called the zombie apocalypse trope, in which entire
communities, whole countries and
even the world are subject to destruction by increasing numbers
of zombies that appear
from nowhere, often originating as a consequence of radiation
from outer space – that is, if
any rationale for their existence is proffered. In these films the
zombie presence is qualita-
tively different from the earlier zombie trope, derived from
claims about the existence of
Stratton 267

zombies in Haiti in which witches or evil scientists turned
individuals into zombies as a
means of controlling them. Nevertheless, the foundational idea
of the zombie as a dead
person resurrected to a state that remains nearer death than life
is a constant.
What I will be arguing is that what audiences find most
frightening in the zombie idea
is not the resurrection from death, but the state of living death
that is the fate of the zom-
bie. Indeed, in some films that are identified as a part of the
zombie genre, such as the
recent 28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle, 2002), the person does
not even die before turn-
ing into what is now being described as a zombie. In this case,
if the key to the identifica-
tion of a zombie is the interstitial state of being between life
and death, then the zombie
takes on the characteristic of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare
life’. Bare life is difficult
to define because it has two aspects. The first is (for want of a
better word) social. In set-
ting up his discussion of the relationship between bare life and
aesthetics, Anthony
Downey writes:
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural,
economic and geographical borders are
lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political
redress, these lives exist in a
limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and
sustaining the essentials of life.
The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim
of torture, the dispossessed – all

have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of
the social sphere, appeal to the
safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law.
They have been outlawed, so to
speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a
precarious relationship to law itself.
(2009: 109)
Members of all these groups, including displaced people, can be
thought of as experienc-
ing bare life in its modern form.
The second describes the existential state of a person placed in
this circumstance.
Following Agamben, I argue elsewhere that the typifying
existential state is that to which
many Jews were reduced in the concentration and death camps
of Nazi Germany: a per-
son in this condition was called in many camps a Muselmann
(Stratton, forthcoming,
2011).1 This state, often described as a living death, closely
resembles that of the zombie
– the difference being that zombies, living after death, are
portrayed as fundamentally
threatening to the living, while the Muselmänner lived only
until their transformation
into the dead was complete. The point here is twofold: that
excluded from the rights and
privileges of the modern state, those displaced people are
positioned legally as bare life;
and that in this legal limbo, these people can be treated in a way
that enables them to
become associated with a condition mythically exemplified in
the zombie. The conse-
quence is that not only can the zombie texts of films and other
media be read as reproduc-

ing this connection, drawing on present-day anxieties to
increase the terror produced by
these texts, but displaced people are characterized using the
same terminology that
describes the threat that zombies generate in zombie apocalypse
texts.
The popularity of zombies
Through the first decade of the 21st century there has been a
very significant increase in
the cultural presence of zombies.2 In January 2006, Steven
Wells, in an article in the
Guardian, wrote that ‘there were zombies everywhere in 2005’
(cited in Bishop, 2009:
19). That same year in March, Warren St. John commented in
the New York Times that: ‘In
films, books and video games, the undead are once again on the
march, elbowing past
werewolves, vampires, swamp things and mummies to become
the post-millennial ghoul
of the moment’ (cited in Bishop, 2009: 19). What St. John’s
remark signals is something
quite important, that it is not just that there has been an increase
in visibility of zombies as
a consequence of their appearance in an increased number of
texts, but that this increase

outstrips other conventional horror characters such as
werewolves and vampires.
It is worth noting that vampires also have recently enjoyed a
renaissance in popularity.
In the late 1990s, Angel and Spike appeared in Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. They helped to
start a shift to more humanized vampires that could be love
objects. Since then, vampires
have appeared in the four Twilight books by Stephanie Myer,
the first of which was pub-
lished in 2005, and the immensely popular film of the same
name, made from the books,
was released in 2008 with a sequel, The Twilight Saga: New
Moon, being released the
following year. In 2008 Twilight was the seventh highest
grossing film in the USA (Box
Office Mojo, 2008). Among other recent texts, vampires feature
in a number of televi-
sion series. Moonlight ran for one season in late 2007 and early
2008. The protagonist
was a private investigator who was also a vampire. His love
interest was a mortal woman
who was a reporter. The show achieved a cult following and was
very successful with
adults in the 18–49 range. Originally broadcast on CBS in the
USA, signalling the show’s
particular popularity with women, it was rerun on the CW
television channel which its
president of entertainment has said is aimed at women in the
18–34 demographic (New
York Daily News, 2010). The Vampire Diaries, in which a
mortal woman becomes
romantically entangled with vampires, began in September 2009
on CW. It rapidly won
its timeslot for a female viewing audience aged up to 34. In

these texts vampires, which
used to suggest forbidden sexual desire, now constitute the love
interest in a more liber-
ated time (Punter and Byron, 2004).3 An early example of this
genre was the 1983 cult
film The Hunger (dir. Tony Scott), which starred Catherine
Deneuve, Susan Sarandon
and David Bowie, although crucially in this film the vampire is
a woman. In addition,
vampires are a key character component of the HBO cable
television network’s True
Blood series, which is based on Charlaine Harris’ The Southern
Vampire Mysteries nov-
els, first published in 2001. In these texts vampires are either
the source of forbidden
romance or are integrated problematically into everyday
society, or both. Vampires, then,
have lost their traditional fear factor and are positioned more as
a strange Other who have
different cultural ways and are sometimes still a threat,
especially to the one that loves
them, but one that is generally manageable. Coming out of an
American society dealing
with major changes in its racial profile, and in a country where
marriage between the
races has become acceptable only relatively recently, these
vampire texts suggest among
others a racial reading, one in which the dominant society is
struggling to come to terms
with a rapidly changing racial order.4 As we shall see, zombies
can be read racially, but
this reading places them as a racial threat to western
civilization.
There is nothing benign about zombies. In short, as Simon Pegg,
the writer of and

actor in Shaun of the Dead, a British zombie film released in
2004, remarks: ‘As mon-
sters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and
werewolves when it comes to the
Stratton 269
title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster’ (Pegg, 2008). It
needs to be noted that Pegg
has an ahistorical view of these monsters:
Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial
savagery, the zombie trumps
all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our
destiny writ large. Slow and steady
in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie
relentlessly closes in, unstoppable,
intractable. (Pegg, 2008)
As I have argued, the sex and bestial savagery of vampires has
now been tamed into a
disturbing and disruptive cultural difference, fear transformed
into a romantic frisson,
within a cultural pluralist multiculturalism. The fear of zombies
is now not so much
about death as of those excluded from western societies who
seem to be threatening civi-
lization as we know it in the West.
Thus zombies have become the most important mythic monster

at the present time. In
an astute discussion of the zombie phenomenon, Peter Dendle
writes about ‘the resur-
gence of zombie movie popularity in the early 2000s’ (2007:
54). For him, this ‘has been
linked with the events of September 11, 2001’ (2007: 54).
Making a different but still
generalizing claim to Pegg’s, Dendle goes on to argue that:
[A]pocalypticism has always been ingrained into the archetypal
psyche of any society defining
itself – as all human endeavours must – in the context of history
and time. The possibility of
wide-scale destruction and devastation which 9-11 brought once
again into the communal
consciousness found a ready narrative expression in the zombie
apocalypses which over thirty
years had honed images of desperation subsistence and amoral
survivalism to a fine edge.
(2007: 54)
Following Dendle, Kyle Bishop makes a similar point:
Although the conventions of the zombie genre remain largely
unchanged, the movies’ relevance
has become all the more clear – a post-9/11 audience cannot
help but perceive the characteristics
of zombie cinema through the filter of terrorist threats and
apocalyptic reality. (2009: 24)
Both Dendle and Bishop argue that 9/11 had a considerable
impact on the American
national imaginary, and that this is expressed in the way that
Americans make and read
zombie films.

However, films made outside the USA, and even a recent
American zombie film such
as Romero’s Land of the Dead, released in 2005, show evidence
of quite a different anxi-
ety. To understand this, we need to begin with a discussion of
what constitutes a zombie.
As Dendle argues:
The essence of the ‘zombie’ at the most abstract level is
supplanted, stolen, or effaced
consciousness; it casts allegorically the appropriation of one
person’s will by another. It is no
coincidence that the creature flourished in the twentieth
century, a century whose broad
intellectual trends were preoccupied with alienation. (2007: 47–
48)
Here, Dendle is extrapolating from a history that refers back to
the zombie as a charac-
teristic of Haitian voodoo. In doing so he elides the recognition
that, often, the zombies
of the zombie apocalypse films after Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead are not created
by someone. They do not have will, but they are not in
somebody’s control. Indeed, this
is one of things that make them so frightening – their existence
is entirely alien.

Dendle traces the American popular cultural interest in zombies
to the American
occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. He writes:
Ghosts and revenants are known world-wide, but few are so
consistently associated with
economy and labour as the shambling corpse of Haitian vodun,
brought back from the dead to
toil in the fields and factories by miserly land-owners or by
spiteful houngan or bokor priests
… The zombie, a soulless hulk mindlessly working at the
bidding of another, thus records a
residual communal memory of slavery: of living a life without
dignity and meaning, of going
through the motions. (2007: 47)
Dendle links the rise of American interest in zombies to the
Great Depression and the
crisis of labour. It is an important point. In post-Night of the
Living Dead zombie apoca-
lypse films, the link between the zombie and slavery, and by
extension the worker in a
capitalist economy, has been repressed. As we shall see, in the
films where the zombies
can be read as displaced people, this connection is reappearing.
Joan Dayan, an anthropologist, recently provided this
description of the zombie:
Born out of the experience of slavery and the sea passage from
Africa to the New World, the
zombie tells the story of colonization: the reduction of human
into thing for the ends of capital.
For the Haitian no fate is to be more feared. (1997: 33)
Dayan goes on to explain that, in the present day:

In a contemporary Caribbean development of American style,
the zombi phenomenon
obviously goes beyond the machinations of the local boco. As
Depestre puts it, ‘This fantastic
process of reification and assimilation means the total loss of
my identity, the psychological
annihilation of my being, my zombification.’ And Laënnec
Hurbon explains how the zombi
stories produce and capitalize on an internalization of slavery
and passivity, making the victims
of an oppressive social system the cause: ‘The phantasm of the
zombi … does nothing but attest
to the fulfilment of a system that moves the victim to
internalize his condition.’ (1997: 33)
Dayan’s purpose is to explain how, in the present Haitian
context, the zombie functions as
an explanation for the destruction of Haitian culture by
American colonialism disguised
as development. The mindless zombie, labouring for another,
becomes a way of under-
standing the impact of American capital on Haiti, and the
Caribbean more generally.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2002) make a similar point
about the rise in zom-
bie stories in South Africa:
There can be no denying the latter-day preoccupation with
zombies in rural South Africa. Their
existence, far from being the subject of elusive tales from the
backwoods, of fantastic fables

Stratton 271
from the veld, is widely taken for granted. As a simple matter of
fact. In recent times, respectable
local newspapers have carried banner headlines like ‘Zombie
Back from the Dead’ illustrating
their stories with conventional, high-realist photographs.
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2002:
786–787)
The Comaroffs argue that the zombie narrative is a useful way
for people who do not
understand the complexities of international, neoliberal
capitalism to account for how
some people apparently become rich very quickly without doing
any visible work: they
create zombies who work for them and do not have to be paid.
Looking over the history
of zombies in Africa, the Comaroffs state:
Zombies themselves seem to be born, at least in the first
instance, of colonial encounters, of the
precipitous engagement of local worlds with imperial economies
that seek to exert control over
the essential means of producing value, means like land and
labor, space and time. (2002: 795)
In other words, at a conceptual level, zombies are a local
response of the colonized to the
impact of colonial capitalism, a way of understanding how those
capitalist practices pro-
duce wealth for some and immiseration for others.

From Pride and Prejudice to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
At this point we can return to the Caribbean. Two years before
Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead revisioned the zombie trope, Jean Rhys published a
book in England that is
now written about as a key postcolonial novel. Wide Sargasso
Sea is a kind of answer
text, which Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
(1989) describe as a literary
work that writes back to the book that inspired it, illuminating
the colonizing assump-
tions that underpin the earlier novel. In this case that novel is
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre. Published in 1847, 34 years after Pride and Prejudice,
Jane Eyre tells the story of
a young woman’s rise from a straightened childhood eventually
to marry Edward
Rochester, the owner of Thornfield Hall. What Jane does not
know until the day that she
is supposed to marry Rochester is that he is already married. He
keeps his first wife,
whom he regards as mad, locked in the attic under the
ministrations of Grace Poole. This
wife is Bertha Mason, the Creole woman from Jamaica whose
dowry of ₤30,000 is the
source of Rochester’s wealth. Unable to marry, Jane refuses to
cohabit with Rochester
and leaves. Later, Bertha escapes her prison and sets fire to the
house, committing sui-
cide by jumping from the roof. Rochester loses his sight and his
left hand in trying to
save her. Finally, Jane and Rochester are able to marry.
What Rhys divined was that behind this romance lay the story

of an abused first wife,
married for her colonial wealth and then discarded. Wide
Sargasso Sea tells Bertha’s
story. In this novel we find that Bertha was originally named
Antoinette, and that it is
Rochester who renames her. Rhys’s narrative highlights the
power imbalance between
the Caribbean colonies and Britain while also showing how, at
the time of the novel,
much of the wealth on which Britain’s gentry depended came
from these colonies in
which slavery had only been abolished in 1834, and many
remained slaves for a further
six years. In a discussion of the novel, Thomas Loe has argued
that the zombie is ‘an
extremely potent central image associated with Antoinette’
(1991: 35). One of its pur-
poses would seem to be to give an exotic quality to the
Caribbean, compared to the
mundane realism of Rochester’s England. However, the zombie
motif does other work.
Loe argues that Antoinette’s mother is made into a zombie, that
Antoinette tries to
zombify Rochester in the hope of keeping his love, and that
most importantly of all for
my purpose here, Rochester attempts to turn Antoinette into a
zombie. For Loe,

the figure of the zombie provides Rhys with an astonishingly
appropriate metaphor for
dramatizing her vision of the powerless and displaced woman
against [what Judith Gardiner
calls] the ‘unified ideology’ of ‘capitalism, colonialism, and
patriarchal domination’. (1991: 41)
Rochester tries to transform Antoinette while moving her to
England, attempting to
remake her as a woman of the gentry, even going so far as to
change her name from the
French-influenced Antoinette to the solidly English Bertha. He
does not succeed. Instead,
Antoinette becomes ‘mad’, a victim of a failed zombification,
displaced from her
Jamaican home to an England she neither likes nor understands,
caught between two
cultures.
On a blog site called Boing Boing, in a response to a review of
Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies, nanuq comments:
Any classic book could be improved with a few zombies around.
Charles Dickens seems a
natural for that (Zombie versions of A Tale of Two Cities or
Oliver Twist practically write
themselves). Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would be great
too (Catherine coming back as
a zombie! Mr Rochester keeping his zombie wife locked in the
attic!). (Boing Boing, 2009)
nanuq does not realise that Antoinette has been made into a
zombie already by Rochester
– a consequence of Rochester wanting to live off the wealth

acquired by her family’s
colonial Jamaican plantation. What is unknown in Jane Eyre,
and remains obscure in
Wide Sargasso Sea, is whether Bertha/Antoinette has a black
ancestor. However, the
implication is that she has. Nevertheless in metaphor,
Antoinette’s journey to England,
her displacement, reveals the slave past in terms of a zombie
present.
We can now turn to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-
Smith and Austen,
2009). Austen’s Pride and Prejudice remains her most popular
book. It is a romance that
is also a comedy of manners about the early 19th-century
English landed gentry, and its
setting is restricted to England. Stimulated by the work of
Edward Said, there has been
some debate over Austen’s awareness of the slavery in the
colonial Caribbean, the plan-
tations of which provided some of the wealth which made the
life of the English gentry
possible. In 1772, Lord Mansfield’s judgment in the case of a
recaptured runaway slave
owned by a man from Boston visiting England, known after the
slave’s name as the
Somersett case, established the basis for ending slavery in
England. However, as I have
already mentioned, slavery in the British colonies continued
until the Emancipation Act
came into force in 1834. Austen published Pride and Prejudice
in 1813 and Mansfield
Park in 1814.
In Mansfield Park, the wealth that sustains Sir Thomas Bertram
and his family at the

home that bears the name of the man who ended slavery in
England derives from Sir
Stratton 273
Thomas’s plantation in Antigua. There are problems on the
plantation that require his
presence. Commenting on the narrative, Said remarks:
Whatever was wrong there – and the internal evidence garnered
by Warren Roberts suggests
that economic depression, slavery, and competition with France
were at issue – Sir Thomas was
able to fix thereby maintaining his control over his colonial
domain. (1993: 87).
I do not want to enter the debate as to whether or not Austen
approved of slavery (although
it seems to me that the evidence points to her disapproval of it;
see Fraiman, 1995). Said
explains that:
The Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave
trade, sugar, and the colonial
planter class; as a social type Sir Thomas would have been
familiar to eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century readers who knew the powerful influence of
this class through politics,
plays … and many other public activities (large houses, famous
parties and social rituals, well-

known commercial enterprises, celebrated marriages). (1993:
94).
In his history of British colonial slavery, Robin Blackburn
(1997) argues that the wealth
derived from New World slavery formed the necessary basis for
the industrial
revolution.
Austen’s indication of the presence of slavery in the colonies,
and its importance,
occurs in the novel following Pride and Prejudice. As
Suvendrini Perera remarks:
This growing visibility of the navy in Mansfield Park
supplements the increasing presence of
empire at the edges of Austen’s texts; progressively, her ‘3 or 4
Families in a Country Village’
… come to encompass and incorporate more extensive portions
of the globe. (1991: 47)
Only a decade earlier, in 1804, the slaves of Haiti had
completed a successful rebellion
against the French and, as Perera suggests, ‘the terrifying
possibility of a Haiti-style rebel-
lion in the English slave colonies had instantly become a
national obsession’ (1991: 20).
What, then, are we to make of the zombies that increasingly
threaten the social life of
the gentry in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? As is usual in
zombie apocalypse texts,
we are not told from whence they came. In this text, Elizabeth
Bennett and her sisters are
trained in martial arts so that they can act as vigilantes, killing
zombies. They have vis-

ited China where they learnt Kung Fu from Shaolin monks.
What we do know is that
zombies have been roaming the English countryside for a
generation or more. We know
that London has been walled and that the army moves from area
to area of England, try-
ing to keep the zombies under control. We know also that
zombies are comparable to
‘savages’ because Mr Darcy remarks to Sir William Lucas that:
‘Every savage can dance.
Why, I imagine that even zombies could do it with some degree
of success’ (Grahame-
Smith and Austen, 2009: 22). Zombies, then, have some
similarity with the black slaves
who were thought of as savages, who work the colonial
Caribbean plantations that sup-
ply the wealth which supports the lifestyle of the gentry (see
Constantine, 1966).5
Zombies do not appear to infest anywhere but England – or
possibly Britain. With the
connection between slavery and zombies that we have already
established, we can now
understand the zombie threat as a return of the repressed.
Whether we read the text liter-
ally in terms of a slave revolt that has spread to England, or
metaphorically as an expres-

sion of the vengeance of the enslaved Africans on which the
gentry’s wealth was built,
what we have is a movement of the displaced from the
Caribbean colonies to England. It
is a zombie apocalypse set in the early 19th century that can be
read as making clear the
connections between English wealth and colonial slavery which,
in this early novel at
least, Austen had elided.
Zombies and the displaced
The narrative of Night of the Living Dead centred on a group of
humans attempting to
defend themselves in a house by stopping it from being overrun
by marauding zombies.
Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), had
the human survivors holed
up in a shopping mall. The trope of a group of humans
defending a space from threaten-
ing zombies has become a common theme in zombie apocalypse
texts, and it is now even
more open to be read in terms of the threat considered to be
posed by illegal immigrants
than in Romero’s first film. In Romero’s fourth zombie film
Land of the Dead, released
in 2005, the parallel between the zombie siege of Pittsburgh and
the fear over illegal
entry to the USA across the Mexican border is easily made:
To ensure the status quo, Dennis Hopper’s Kaufman, the self-
appointed leader of Pittsburgh,
constructs the world’s most extreme border security – blown up
and barricaded bridges make
the rivers impassible, and electric fences and armed guards
protect the area from any intrusion;

in an extreme example of xenophobia, soldiers shoot any
invaders on sight. These forms of
immigration control have become even more jarringly familiar
with recent debates about
erecting a fence between the United States and Mexico and the
redeployment of National
Guard troops to guard the United States’ southern border during
George W. Bush’s presidency.
(Bishop, 2009: 24)
Here, the zombies can be easily read as illegal migrants
threatening traditional American
society. With this reading, the zombie acquires again its earlier
reference: a worker who
either is, or is able to be worked into, a comatose state. Indeed,
the worker with no pro-
tection can become a slave.
In zombie films made outside the USA this reading is more
available. In Shaun of the
Dead, with the sudden transformation of people into zombies,
Shaun and his white
friends make for their local pub, The Winchester, as the most
defensible place he can
think of. In British films, the pub is historically the place of
community, as it is for
example in Passport To Pimlico (dir. Henry Cornelius, 1949).
By extension, in Shaun of
the Dead the pub is a synecdoche for a white England under
siege from a range of illegal
immigrants, asylum-seekers and so forth, all trying to breach
the pub’s defences. Finally,
the British army comes to the rescue of Shaun and his friends,
killing off the besieging
zombies.

Dead Set was made in England during summer 2008 and shown
on television as a
series of five episodes. In the narrative, a group of reality show
contestants secured in a
Big Brother-style house find themselves threatened by zombies
who appear to have
Stratton 275
taken over the rest of the country. Davina McCall, who
presented the British Big Brother
series, appears in Dead Set as herself and is transformed into a
zombie. As the series
proceeds, the zombies gradually overwhelm the occupants of the
house. In this narrative,
the zombies are triumphant. Dead Set was nominated for a
British Academy of Film and
Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Drama Serial. As in
Shaun of the Dead, the
horror of the zombie threat is increased by the ease with which
the zombies can be read
as illegal immigrants – or, indeed, legal immigrants from
elsewhere in the European
Union who are often identified as overwhelming British society.
In his Guardian article quoted earlier, Pegg comments on his
dislike of Charlie
Brooker’s use of ‘fast’ zombies – that is zombies that walk and
run, rather than stagger
slowly, in Dead Set. In what one presumes is supposed to be

read as a jokey riposte,
Brooker responds: ‘Simon: your outright rejection of running
zombies leaves you
exposed, in a very real and damning sense, as a terrible racist’
(Brooker, 2008). If zom-
bies stand for those displaced people attempting to enter
Britain, then they are indeed
mostly non-white. The immiseration of the displaced people at
the border is expressed in
the bare life that is represented in the zombies. The racialized
difference of those people
is metaphorized in the zombies’ difference from humans.
With this in mind we should not be surprised that, in a
voiceover at the end of Shaun
of the Dead that tells us what happens after the zombie threat
has been quelled, we are
told that the few remaining zombies are used as gameshow
participants and domestics.
Domestic work is characteristic labour for illegal immigrants
across the West. Shaun of
the Dead can be read analogically, whereas Children of Men
presents a literal image of
Britain falling to the pressure of displaced people entering the
country.
In Fido (dir. Andrew Currie), a Canadian zombie film released
in 2006, zombies are
fitted with a specially invented collar that renders them
harmless to humans.6 They can
be used for menial work, and any household that does not have
at least one zombie
domestic is considered to be socially embarrassed. Fido goes
even further in the develop-
ment of the zombie–displaced people connection. Set in a 1950s
America after the

Zombie Wars, towns are fenced off from the Wild Zone where
the zombies without col-
lars still prowl, attempting to enter the areas where humans live.
In an information film
that we see at the beginning made by ZomCom, the company
that makes the zombie col-
lars, we are told, in rhetoric which echoes anxieties over border
security that stretch from
illegal immigrants to terrorists, that the advent of the zombies
meant that ‘we were forced
to defend our homeland ... mankind pitted against legions of the
undead’. ZomCom also
‘built security systems like the perimeter fence that encloses our
towns in a wall of pro-
tective steel’. The film’s title comes from the name that Timmy,
the Robinsons’ young
son, gives the zombie that his mother acquires for their home. It
is, of course, a name that
is typically given to a dog, although nobody in the film
acknowledges this. When Timmy
plays baseball with Fido, he acts towards him in the way that
black servants historically
were treated: for example, by telling him to get the ball: ‘Go
fetch it, boy!’ These zom-
bies are marked as racially different and, indeed, not human. In
these films, but espe-
cially in Fido, the zombie as bare life is linked with the zombie
as unenfranchised worker.
An Australian low-budget film, Undead (dir. Michael and Peter
Spierig, 2003), was
made over a number of years and is perhaps one of the stranger
recent additions to the
zombie genre.7 The film includes both zombies and an alien
visitation from space. A

small town in Queensland is the focus of a zombie outbreak
caused by something raining
down from outer space. Marion is a survivalist who has been
affected by this develop-
ment before, when the fish he was catching turned into zombies.
He is convinced that the
aliens are a part of the zombie threat. When asked by Sallyanne:
‘Have you ever seen
anything like this before?’, he answers: ‘I have. It’s an
invasion. The end of life as we
know it.’ The police are shown to be incompetent and unable to
understand what to do in
the new circumstance. Marion takes charge of protecting the
small group of people who
have escaped transformation into zombies. He is a characteristic
figure in recent
Australian film. Similar to Mick Taylor, the kangaroo shooter
and serial killer in Wolf
Creek (dir. Greg McLean, 2005), and the unnamed kangaroo
shooter in Lucky Miles (dir.
Michael Rowland, 2007) who both appear to be patrolling
Australia’s border, Marion
attempts to protect the village from what he thinks are the
depredations of the aliens (see
Stratton, 2007, 2009). By the end of the film, it turns out that
the aliens are actually trying
to stop the zombie plague and return everybody to being human.
Thinking that they have

succeeded, they leave. Unfortunately, one of the townsfolk, who
has been bitten by a
zombie, escapes confinement and infects the rest of Australia.
This time, the aliens do
not return.
This somewhat confusing combination of zombie apocalypse
and sci-fi film can make
sense in the context of John Howard’s government ramping up
the Australian popula-
tion’s anxieties about asylum-seekers in the early 2000s. In
2001, the government refused
entry to shipwrecked asylum-seekers picked up by the MV
Tampa, started the so-called
Pacific
Solution
where asylum-seekers were sent to detention camps in other
countries in
the Pacific region while they waited to be processed, and altered
Australia’s migration
zone to exclude the Australian islands around the north of the
country. Also in 2001,
shortly before a federal election, the Howard government
promoted the idea that asylum-
seekers on a boat had been threatening to throw their children
overboard. The practical
consequence of these and other acts by the government was that

the general population
became increasingly concerned about the threat posed by
asylum-seekers and voted the
government back into power. The more general consequence
was an increase in
Australians’ xenophobic fear of illegal immigration.
With this history we are now better able to read Undead. Here
again, the zombie
threat is a translation of the fear generated by, in this Australian
case, specifically asylum-
seekers attempting to find a home in Australia. In this film, it
seems, nothing can stop
them, certainly not the police or even the local survivalist,
except aliens. We now need to
think about these aliens. They emit light, they wear what look
like cassocks with cowls
and, as they cure people of zombification, those people are
taken into the clouds until the
aliens have eradicated the zombie scourge. The Christian
connotations are spelt out by
Rene near the end of the film, when she is trying to convince
Marion that he has been
wrong about the aliens’ intentions. She says: ‘Aliens are the
saviours. It’s not us.’ It

seems that ‘we’ are simply not powerful enough to save
Australia from the zombies. At
one point in the film, when Rene is shooting down zombies in
the town’s general store,
she has the Australian flag behind her. We, the white
Australians, need God or some
Christian force allied to God, to save us. When that is no longer
available, Australia is
overrun. It is easy to see how Undead’s zombies can stand in for
asylum-seekers at a time
when Australian anxiety over asylum-seekers had been ramped
up to extreme levels.
Stratton 277
Rhetoric
That Fido can make such a clear analogy between displaced
people and zombies is

because the same rhetoric is used for each. Zombies provide a
monster for our time
because they express our anxieties over the relationship
between bare life and the mod-
ern state. As I have noted previously, zombies are an expression
of bare life. From the
viewpoint of the members of those countries of the West, the
displaced people attempting
to enter them are also bare life. They have no protection from
any state. This underlying
similitude enables the same metaphors to be used for both
zombies and displaced people.
Where zombies appear as a remorseless threat laying siege to
wherever humans manage
to collect to defend themselves, displaced people are
constructed in the same way, as a
threat at the border of the state. In an article on the way that
Austrian newspapers write
about asylum-seekers, Elisabeth El Refaie describes how
‘Kurdish refugees are quite
regularly represented as an “army” on the point of “invading”
Europe, and their arrival
is often referred to as an Ansturm [onslaught] or Invasion
[invasion]’ (2001: 364). She
quotes from a newspaper article that writes of ‘new hordes of

applicants for asylum’
(2001: 364). While an onslaught or invasion might conjure up
an image of an organized,
rational army, ‘horde’ implies a disorganized, irrational mass.
El Refaie explains:
In other articles, the ‘war’ metaphor is also evoked by verbs,
which describe the refugees as
‘forcing their way’ (drängen) over the border into Europe, of
‘invading’ (eindringen) Germany
and of ‘storming’ (stürmen) Fortress Europe. (2001: 364–365)
All these metaphors suggest that Europe is under siege from a
mindless throng.
In describing the language used in Australia, Sharon Pickering
lists some of the terms
that she found in the Brisbane Courier Mail and the Sydney
Morning Herald between
1997 and 1999 to describe the threat posed by asylum-seekers:
‘we’ are soon to be ‘awash’, ‘swamped’, ‘weathering the
influx’, of ‘waves’, latest waves’,
‘more waves’, ‘tides’, ‘floods’, ‘migratory flood’, ‘mass
exodus’ of ‘aliens’, ‘queue jumpers’,

illegal immigrants’. (2001: 172)
Terms such as ‘wave’ and ‘flood’ use the water reference to
conjure up some overwhelm-
ing and amorphous force. They are dehumanizing expressions
that identify the asylum-
seekers as a mass rather than as individuals. These people are
‘aliens’ constructed, as
Pickering points out, in a system of binary logic ‘which
routinely renders one normal and
the other strange/other’ (2001: 172). Thinking of the zombie as
bare life, this is the
binary Other of the humanizing effect of membership of modern
society.
As in zombie films, Pickering shows that it is the human
members of the Australian
state who are the ones under siege, their civilized existence
always at threat from the
zombified bare life attempting to enter the protected space. As
Pickering states:
In the case of asylum seekers, the boundaries [between ‘us’ and
‘them’] are easily identified by
the discrete nation state – not only fixed national and

geographic boundaries in the case of
Australia but also those of race. In ‘record arrest’, ‘swoop’,
‘incident’, ‘criminal gangs’ and
‘illegal run’, criminal justice discourse becomes interwoven
with that of war: ‘incursion’,
sustained assault on Australian shores’, ‘gathering to our north’,
‘massing in Indonesia’, all to
invade the ‘land of hope’. (2001: 174)
Here again, this ‘war’ that Australia is fighting is actually a
siege in which the country is
being defended against the invasion of a racial Other that is
disorganized, massified and
relentless. They appear, like apocalyptic zombies, as a faceless,
unthinking mass of less-
than-human people that accumulates at the border, threatening

to overwhelm the state’s
defences by their sheer pressure and destroy the human beings
and the social order inside.
These examples are drawn from work studying the rhetoric used
for asylum-seekers
in Austria and Australia, and the same terms are used across the
West. As mentioned
previously, displaced people – that is, those officially classified
as illegal immigrants,
asylum seekers, refugees and the like – are bare life striving to
enter states where they
will be given protection. Those states experience them as an
unregulated threat to life
within the border. As Aihwa Ong writes: ‘In camps of the
disenfranchised or displaced,
bare life becomes the ground for political claims, if not for
citizenship, then for the right
to survive’ (2006: 501). At the same time, in the modern state,
bare life is the basis for
the treatment even of citizens of the state. The zombie is the
mythic expression of racial-
ized bare life striving to enter the state but, at the same time,
the zombie is the condition
that awaits all of us from whom the state withdraws protection.

The zombies besieging
the places of sanctuary in zombie apocalypse films can be read
as displaced people seek-
ing recognition from the countries of the West. As Pride and
Prejudice and Zombies
makes clear, they bear the histories of the enslaved whose
labour enabled the quality of
life at the heart of the colonial empires, and which provided the
wealth for the industrial
revolution. However, the zombies are also an image of what we
– members of the mod-
ern state – might become. In the modern state, bare life founds
the political order. In the
neoliberal version of that state, where rights are dependent on
what people within the
border of the state can offer to its economic wellbeing, the
degree to which one is
reprieved from bare life depends on one’s economic worth. In
this way, within the state,
labour returns as an inverse measure of zombification, while
without the protection of
the state, bare life equates with the most menial and unprotected
forms of labour, exem-
plified in the zombie as domestic.

Conclusion
As I have explained previously, bare life has a dual meaning. In
the first place it refers
to lack of legal protection by the state. Without that protection,
the person reduced to
bare life can become transformed into the second understanding
of bare life: the liminal
condition of death-in-life. Indeed, such a person can become
one of the living dead.
This is the existential condition represented in the zombie. The
equation of the zombie
and the displaced person occurs through the construction of bare
life in both aspects of
the term. The new fascination with zombie apocalypse texts can
be understood in rela-
tion, but of course is not limited, to the increasing anxiety of
members of western states
founded in the threat that these states feel is posed by
racialized, displaced people. Both
manifestations of bare life are described using the same
discursive terms. The fear of

Stratton 279
what is perceived to be an external threat from the zombie Other
helps those who live
in western states to repress awareness of how easily their own
existence can become
reduced to bare life.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding
agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. The referenced article is a companion to this one.
2. I even have a T-shirt, made in the USA, bearing the legend:
‘Zombie Outbreak Response
Team’. It includes the slogan: ‘Shoot Them In The Head; They

Stay Dead.’
3. David Punter and Glennis Byron in The Gothic write that:
‘Early vampires are not only aris-
tocrats, but also seducers, and from the start the vampire has
been associated with sexuality’
(2004: 269).
4. In the USA, interracial marriage was legalized across the
country by a 1967 Supreme Court
decision. It was only in 2000 that the census allowed
respondents to claim two or more racial
backgrounds.
5. On the 18th-century understanding of slaves as savages, see
Constantine (1966). Constantine
argues that: ‘The ignoble savage stereotype came to be used as a
basic factor in the defense of
slavery and slave trading’ (1966: 171).
6. For reviews of Fido see, for example, Biodrwoski (2007),
Cinerina (2007) and The Horror
Geek (2008).
7. It is not the first Australian zombie film; that would seem to

be Zombie Brigade, released in
1986. In this film the zombies are Vietnam War veterans risen
from the dead to take revenge
on the attempt by Japanese developers to build a theme park on
the site of the war memorial.
The anxieties here would seem to connect with longstanding
Australian fears of Asian
invasion.
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Biographical note

Jon Stratton is Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin
University. He has published broadly across
cultural studies, Jewish studies, Australian studies and popular
music studies. His research focus is
on race and identity, and his most recent books are: Britpop and
the English Music Tradition
(edited with Andy Bennett, Ashgate, 2010), Jews, Race and
Popular Music (Ashgate, 2009) and
Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and
Trauma through Modernity (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008). He has also edited, with Suvendrini Perera, a
special issue of the journal
Continuum entitled ‘The Border, the Asylum Seeker and the
State of Exception’. Currently, he is
turning his essays on Australian neoliberalism and asylum-
seekers into a book.

39
CHAPTER ONE
The Setting and the Characters: The Social Life of
Anticommunism
The Vietnamese Federation of San Diego’s [community
center/house] sits unobtrusively on the south side of Linda Vista
Boulevard, just about
half a mile beyond the Asian business district on Convoy
Avenue, at the periphery of the
community in San Diego called Linda Vista.89 Prior to its
establishment in Linda Vista in
1995, was located in East San Diego where there was, and is, a
high
concentration of newer immigrants, including Vietnamese. Le
Thi Diem Thuy begins her

novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For with a mapping of
one Vietnamese refugee
family’s movement around San Diego:
Linda Vista, with its rows of yellow houses, is where we
eventually washed to
shore. Before Linda Vista, we lived in the Green Apartment on
Thirtieth and
Adams, in Normal Heights. Before the Green Apartment, we
lived in the Red
Apartment on Forty-ninth and Orange, in East San Diego.
Before the Red
Apartment we weren’t a family like we are a family now. We
were in separate
places, waiting for each other.90
In this mapping, we see how refugee migrations across the
Pacific splintered one family
and their journey to becoming a family again traverses the low-
income neighborhoods of
East San Diego and Linda Vista. Le’s mapping of the narrator’s

temporary homes
parallels the movement of as well. While the moved from
an inconvenient location on the second floor of a business
building in East San Diego to
its own building in Linda Vista in order to house meetings and
events more efficiently
89 Linda Vista, in Spanish translates to “pretty view,” is also
home to the private Catholic University of San
Diego. This community was where many Vietnamese refugees
settled in the late 1970s and 1980s and one
of the clearly visible geographical imprints are the Vietnamese
businesses in the area, including the Vien
Dong Supermarket.
90 Le 2003: 3.
40

and spaciously, during my time on the Board of Directors, I
have witnessed an ongoing
effort to move it back to East San Diego to better serve the area
with the most social
need. To buy their own property and relocate to East San Diego
has been an ongoing
project for each of the presidents since 1995, but it remains
unfulfilled. While I
conducted fieldwork, I spent a great deal of time at the for
weekly Board
of Director meetings and special events during the weekends.
The provided a home base for me to regularly interface with
community members and gain valuable insight into the lives of
first generation
Vietnamese Americans. While I was able to spend some time at
elders’ homes, the

routine of meetings and events at became a productive site to
observe
how anticommunist discourse and practices serve as modes
through which many first
generation Vietnamese American men and women create a space
to talk about their pasts
and their memories of South Vietnam as well as a means of
delineating their right to
belong in the United States. If memories of the
Vietnam/American War and postwar
aftermaths have become ghostly imprints in national narratives,
what spaces enable such
memories to emerge? As the past is called upon for the purpose
of articulating a uniquely
Vietnamese American identity in the present, how does
anticommunism serve the needs
of a community desiring a “place to stand [ ” in US society?91 I

ask what
shapes and forms do refugee memories take in between the
private and public realms
through which anticommunist discourse and practices travel?
This chapter examines the
weekly meetings and other routine “ [community activities]” of
the
91 I borrow the phrase “place to stand” from an interview
participant who told me that Vietnamese refugees
need to find a place to stand in the United States, or “
41
Vietnamese Federation over the span of four years, from the
summer of 2002 to the
summer of 2006.92 This period covers two executive board

terms for the Viet Fed, both of
which were under the leadership of the same president and a
relatively stable Board of
Directors (hereafter called BoD). I examine the weekly
meetings as a social space that
reveals the making of community at the intimate level, a space
where members share
common objectives and work through their differences. This
space sustains many of the
members in more ways than the obvious. That is, each week
they are able to do more
than plan upcoming community events or discuss current
political issues with their peers.
In the safe space of the conference room at they can relate to
each other
as friends; and for me they have become another type of family
in San Diego. Because of

the disruptive forces of war and migration in Vietnamese
refugee lives, I believe that
family, in whatever form we can find, is a hard-won and prized
concept for Vietnamese
Americans.
I explore the ways anticommunism has functioned as a “practice
of everyday
life,” to borrow from Michel de Certeau’s seminal work. In The
Practice of Everyday
Life, de Certeau insists upon a means of examining how
individuals re-appropriate
traditions, symbols, art, and language—the stuff of cultural
identities—in order that they
may subvert dominant regimes of representation that seek to
conform individuals to
predetermined identities. Thus everyday life can be a productive

analytical site that may
offer individuals a chance to create meaning for themselves
against the grain of totalizing
narratives. If “Vietnam War” history is one such totalizing
narrative that posits
92 I became involved with the Vietnamese Federation during
the summer of 2002 when I came to a general
election to seek interview subjects for a conference paper and
became an “accidental” independent delegate
first, then a Board of Directors member.
42
Vietnamese Americans as either injured victims of the or
deserving refugees
of the US nation, then how do individuals respond to and re-
appropriate this discourse in

the everyday tasks of community work? While the structures of
meeting and community
work deviate from the quotidian practices of everyday living as
discussed by de Certeau,
I expand the notion of “everyday life” to include how the Viet
Fed meetings may reflect
the everyday work of community building. That is, the frequent,
routine, and predictable
nature of the meetings allows for an analysis of community
work at the more intimate
and grounded level.
While there certainly are other social spaces in which to
examine the meanings of
anticommunist discourse for first generation Vietnamese
Americans, the Viet Fed weekly
meetings are a productive and unique site because of the ways

in which variously
different individuals come together to not only talk, but act
upon their convictions.93 In
fact, this site may be more productive than others because of the
way anticommunist
discourse and practices become seamless facets of community
work. This space
highlights the dynamics of collective memory as well as the
negotiations of class,
generational and gender difference tied to the maintenance of an
anticommunist “moral
community.”94 This intimate space also reveals the ways
members work through
differences and ultimately contrive a solidarity contingent on a
shared (and perhaps
93 Another highly charged “everyday” space that comes to mind

are the coffee shops where Vietnamese
Americans (mainly men) gather and share stories about the old
days and talk politics with each other. I
have lingered outside of these coffee shops in both Orange
County and San Diego to catch the gist of their
conversations which often included the Vietnam-American War
and the war in Iraq. However, this space
was for sharing ideas and stories, not for planning events or
acting upon anticommunist convictions.
94 I borrow the phrase “moral community” from Guillermo J.
Grenier and Lisandro Perez, who argue that
the Cuban community in Miami shows the persistence of an
“exile ideology” which is dependent on the
construction of a “‘moral community’ that serves to build
political capital and a sense of solidarity in the
enclave.” See The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United
States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003).
43
invented) past. First, I describe the meetings and the process of

planning for events in
order to show how anticommunist practices and beliefs often
define community work for
first generation Vietnamese Americans. I am especially
interested in exploring how class,
generation, and gender are negotiated at these meetings in order
to present a unified
community perspective during public events. Then, I describe
the mealtime ritual
occurring at the tail-end of meetings in order to show how it
provides a different space
within the meetings for building affective relationships between
members that continue to
rely on an anticommunist sensibility.
In this meeting space, I have had to confront the ambivalence,
anxieties, and

uncertainties I often felt as a “complicit researcher,” or
“halfie,” as well as fumble
through my role as a BoD member.95 My initial entry into this
organization happened at a
timely moment in the summer of 2002 when a term had just
ended and a new BoD was
being elected. Thus, as I approached Vietnamese elders to make
their acquaintances for
my project, they saw me as a willing recruit into an
organization direly in need of young
faces.96 The meeting space was painfully awkward for me at
first since I did not know
anyone and I certainly did not understand all the community
politics under discussion.
Being relatively new to San Diego also made me feel like an
outsider, or the “un-cool
kid” on the playground who had no one to talk to, no one to

stand next to, no way to just
blend in. The elders always tried to make me feel welcome by
constantly remarking on
95 I borrow the term “complicit researcher” from K. Wayne
Yang, who describes his role this way through
his activist-ethnographic work on urban schools. I use the term
“halfie” to reference Lila Abu-Lughod’s
(1991) argument that “halfies” are those anthropologists who
possess split subjectivities, existing between
cultural and physical spaces.
96 Throughout the dissertation I refer to first generation
Vietnamese Americans as “elders” and the second
generation as “youth” to indicate how community members
reified these categories and terms in their
everyday speech.
44
the need for young blood to reinvigorate the organization and

they often complimented
me on being an exemplary student, a model for other
Vietnamese American youth. Yet I
could not easily start a conversation with elders, in part due to
my upbringing to show
respect through listening rather than speaking and also because
of my “kitchen”
Vietnamese.97 I was constantly insecure about my Vietnamese
language abilities, feeling
a bit inadequate with my limited academic vocabulary.
Although I had ample experience
working with student and some grassroots community
organizations prior to this
fieldwork, I was wholly unprepared to be immersed in a first
generation organization
where I would usually be the only person under 40 at any given
meeting, where all the

business was conducted in Vietnamese. I often spoke a mix of
Vietnamese and English
since complex words such as “theory” and “ideology” were
beyond my grasp in
Vietnamese at that time. A year after I began working with the
Viet Fed, I took two
summer months off to participate in a Vietnamese language
program at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison to better my academic Vietnamese. I
came back from my summer
studies eager to dialogue more with the elders, to find an outlet
for my new relationship
with my native language.
While I initially took the role of the fly-on-the-wall
ethnographer, taking meeting
minutes in English and quietly observing proceedings from my

seat in the corner, as I
became more familiar with the elders and the Viet Fed
programs, I took on more
97 Although I took Vietnamese classes through Catholic Sunday
schools as a youth, my lack of interest
made my Vietnamese reading and writing grade school level at
best. However, I was raised in a household
with parents who did not speak English. I was often their
interpreter for official business and my
Vietnamese-to-English process is rather rapid and accurate. I
could understand everything I heard in
Vietnamese and quickly relay it into English. The opposite
process was significantly slower because I had
very little occasion to have discussions with my parents and my
siblings and I formed the habit of speaking
English with each other.
45

participatory roles. My actual BoD title also changed from
“assistant to the secretary”
during the first term, a role created to get me on the BoD, to
Vice President of External
Affairs for the second term. I became more than a student
researcher-volunteer who may
have the occasional pseudo-important job of representing the
Viet Fed at civic events; I
became a key player in the organization and the organization
became a crucial site of
belonging and community for me.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I began to feel at ease
with elders in the
Viet Fed, so subtly did our relationships develop over a long
period of time. I showed
myself to be patient and doggedly consistent in coming to
meetings because of a

commitment to my research, but more truthfully because this
was the one place in my life
where I could practice being a scholar in Vietnamese. I listened
and learned from them in
ways that I could not with my own parents. And they spoke to
me and looked at me with
a glimmer of respect and a great deal of patience. I practiced
articulating myself in
Vietnamese in order to legitimize my right to do this project as
a “halfie.” So, in this way,
my research allowed me to learn about the meanings of
anticommunism for first
generation Vietnamese Americans while learning how to speak
to elders coherently, to
listen to them thoughtfully in order to interact with them on
terms that conveyed both

respect and critical engagement.
The Vietnamese Federation of San Diego
A Community and Organization Profile
I was introduced to the Viet Fed in 2002 by my dissertation
advisor’s friend, an
energetic first generation Vietnamese American woman
dedicated to recruiting youth
volunteers for community work. At the time, I was merely a
curious outsider who wanted
46
to make contact with Vietnamese veterans of the Republic of
Vietnam military in order to
conduct a study on the civic activities of this group in San
Diego for a conference

paper.98 My first impression of this organization was that it
resembled an old boy’s
network, organized along very militaristic lines. Very few
women held leadership
positions within this organization, but many worked behind the
scenes to sustain the
organization’s events. When I was asked to join the BoD for a
two-year term, I
recognized an opportunity to get to know the Vietnamese
community in San Diego better.
At the time, I was not too concerned about the gender and age
imbalance—being the
token female and youth allowed me to take a more observational
role.
The BoD was (and still is) comprised of the President, two Vice
Presidents

(internal and external affairs), a General Secretary, and a
Treasurer. Other regulars at the
meetings included an advisor to the President (a former
president) and several other
dedicated representatives (Culture, Education, Entertainment
representatives).
Throughout the four years of my involvement, I noticed that the
gender ratio at board
meetings would be around 1 woman to 3 men, sometimes 1 to 4.
This skewed gender
ratio approximates the participation of men and women in the
Viet Fed member
organizations as well, which are still predominantly first
generation organizations. Most
of my interview participants explain that the gender imbalance
can be attributed to two
main factors: the multiple and strenuous demands first

generation women have at home
and/or in the workplace and their “traditional” upbringing that
requires women to take on
more supportive roles in community or public spaces. Nazli
Kibria’s ethnographic study
98 The conference was sponsored by The Regional Studies
Network of the UCSD Civic Collaborative and
was called “San Diego’s Veterans: Understanding Their Critical
Role in the Life of the Region.” My
conference paper was titled, “The View from the Other Side:
Vietnamese Veterans in San Diego.” October
12, 2002.
47
of Vietnamese refugee families reveals that domestic caretaking
in these families was still

conducted primarily by women even while women usually took
on additional
responsibilities such as running businesses, tending to money
matters, negotiating with
social services and healthcare.99 As such, the significantly low
number of women in the
BoD may suggest that the multiple and rigorous demands of
family and work may have a
higher impact on women’s ability to do community work when
compared to their male
counterparts. However, this gender imbalance in first generation
Vietnamese American
organizations does not reflect the numbers of women and men in
attendance at
community events, which tend to be quite evenly distributed.
The skewed gender ratio in
the Viet Fed leadership reflects the structure of many other

post-1965 immigrant
communities in the US where the prevalence of women working
outside the home
subverts prior gender norms; that is, of man as provider and
woman in charge of domestic
care-taking. In response, as Sheba George demonstrates in
When Women Come First,
immigrant men take up prominent community leadership
positions in order to reassert
masculine power and authority.100
The weekly meetings were always held either on Tuesday or
Wednesday in the
conference room of for the BoD and other active members to
debrief past
events, prepare for upcoming events, and review the general
status of the Viet Fed. They

were often quite structured, but there was always room for
digression and humor since
many members were either long-time friends coming into their
roles or soon became
99 Kibria 1993.
100 In particular, George (2005) suggests the church plays a
vital role in offering a space where male
leadership can be articulated for immigrants from Kerala, India,
whose familial and gender roles were
dramatically reversed with the migration of female nurses to the
US.
48
close through frequent interaction.101 Meetings were held at
6:30 p.m., but usually began
around 7:00 p.m. The business portion would run until around
8:30 or 9:00 p.m. (unless

there was an important event coming up that demanded more
attention).
There are two major events that the Viet Fed plans every year,
the Festival
and Black April commemoration, and several other smaller-
scale seasonal events such as
the Trung Thu [Mid-Autumn Moon Festival], Kings and death
anniversaries, and community health fairs. In addition, the Viet
Fed participates in local
fairs and parades such as the Linda Vista Multicultural Fair and
San Diego Veterans Day
Parade as well as relevant charity work such as fundraising for
San Diego Firestorm
(2003, 2007), Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Asian Tsunami
(2004) victims. And, like
other immigrant civic organizations, the Viet Fed participates in

local efforts to raise
funds for homeland causes, such as “ [Disabled Veterans ” or
orphans
in Vietnam and the many floods throughout the Vietnam
countryside. These aid efforts
usually take on the form of benefit concerts, where proceeds
from ticket sales as well as
solicited donations during the events are sent to the appropriate
recipients. These are the
cultural activities I have had part in planning and promoting,
attending and, at times, even
standing up to act as mistress of ceremony. Therefore, my foot
is not only halfway in the
door as a “native” ethnographer attempting to keep objective
distance to what I observe,
but I’ve been thrust into the midst of all the activities despite
my initial reluctance.

101 Two Viet Fed officers who did not know each other prior to
their roles in the BoD became quite close
and discovered they shared a hobby of photography. On many
occasions, they came to each other’s homes
to share photography equipment or show their latest photos.
Occasionally these two officers would pass
along photos they had taken of me (and later, my daughter)
during our weekly meetings.
49
The Viet Fed also acts as representative for Vietnamese
American political
interests, therefore during election years, the Viet Fed has
spearheaded voter registration
efforts and collaborated with the US Attorney General’s office
in making Vietnamese

language voter materials available in San Diego county in 2004.
Board members with
connections to local elected officials have also lobbied a flag
resolution to recognize the
South Vietnam flag by the city of San Diego.102 Other political
activities members
participate in include demonstrations against human rights
abuse by the Vietnam
government or protests against ambassadors and other leaders
from Vietnam. However,
members do so on their own right and not under the banner of
the Viet Fed, since its
501(c)(3) status explicitly forbids political interest activities.
Yet, even if the political activities are relegated to “individual”
interests among
the board, members I argue that “cultural” events planned by
the Viet Fed have always

been politically-charged sites for constructing imagined
community. Always aware of
itself as a refugee organization and deeply concerned with
casting itself in opposition to
Vietnam, the Viet Fed demonstrates that cultural sites have high
political stakes. The
“cultural” events mentioned are imbued with a distinctly
Vietnamese American politics
that demands dialogue with the past. Scholarship on Vietnamese
American communities
should seriously consider the multiple dimensions of the
“cultural,” the ways in which
these sites call into being the omissions in previous historical
constructions of the
Vietnamese diaspora, which may afford us new models for
analyzing community and

identity.
102 In Chapter Three, I discuss the meanings tied to this flag
resolution in greater detail.
50
Because the Festival (in late January to early February) and
Black April
commemoration (weekend closest to April 30) are important
events, but also by now
quite well-rehearsed, the BoD can usually plan for them three to
six months prior. The
Festival is much larger in scale and requires more collaboration
with outside
organizations, vendors, and city resources and as result the
organizers will begin planning

in early fall by reserving the space (either City Heights Urban
Village Performance
Annex or Linda Vista library parking lot), obtaining permits,
and lining up performers.
For Black April, however, the planning happens two to three
months prior when a
committee is formed that includes representatives from elders,
veterans, and student
groups. Committees for both and Black April are constituted by
an open general
meeting that all member organizations may participate in. These
open general meetings
usually occur two to thee times a year and were usually well-
attended (approximately 25-
30 organization and non-affiliated delegates). General meetings
to discuss Black April

always attracted more (mainly male and first generation)
delegates than the Festival
planning meetings, mainly because active community members
tended to be those
committed to the goal of preserving South Vietnamese stories
and challenging
“communist” history.103 In addition, the widespread
appreciation of as a cultural
event gives members rationale to dismiss it as a neutral and
“safe” site. On the other
hand, Black April commemorations are unambiguously political
in nature, even if the
means to convey refugee politics are cultural (e.g. song, skits).
Thus many delegates
103 For instance, elders who came to Black April planning
meetings voice “our” collective stake in
challenging the celebration of April 30 as a day of liberation

and victory over foreign imperialists (as it is
celebrated in Vietnam) rather than a day of “national mourning”
as it has become for Vietnamese refugees.
51
participate in the planning process of Black April in order to
voice their political interests
and police the bounds of Vietnamese American community and
identity.
Slowly, I came to understand, and even appreciate, the distinct
rhythm that the
elders had in their community work. Not all members of the
Viet Fed work at the same
pace and differences have arisen on numerous occasions, but
taken as a whole the BoD
had a certain cohesiveness and predictability. This cohesiveness

can be attributed mainly
to their actual and/or ideological location as refugees and
opponents of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam. Members may not agree on how to run
meetings or events and
what programs should be privileged throughout the year, but
they all “ ”
[oppose communism] to varying degrees. In her notes on a
community forum to bridge
the generation gap, one young Vietnamese American activist
suggests that elders are “not
anti-Communist just to be anti-Communist,” but rather they see
anticommunism as a
vehicle for continuing struggles for freedom in Vietnam. In fact,
they see anticommunism
as in sync with a “pro-Vietnam” stance and continue staging
protests as a way to make

visible the injustices still occurring in the homeland. The
activist quotes an elder’s
explanation: “The hatred is over,” a woman says, “I can live
here in this land, enjoy the
things I have, and never remember those terrible days. I can put
my past behind. What I
cannot put behind, what haunts me and urges me to be active, is
not my own memories –
it is the knowledge that my people still live like that.”104 Like
this woman, many of my
respondents suggest that their own activism is a consequence of
“caring too much” about
their countrymen, of a sense of their good fortunes for leaving
Vietnam when so many
104 From an email article circulated by Yen-Khanh Vu, “To my
Vietnamese friends who hate the way our

community protests” 27 April 2005.
52
could not or died in their attempts. Thus, the commitment to
anticommunism, for many,
is not merely about preserving memories of the past but about
coping with the pain or
guilt of surviving and thriving when so many did not.
/A Place to Stand in the US
[I want to help our community develop and have a place to
stand here in
the United States…We need to try to preserve Vietnamese
culture because
that is our source of strength.]105
During an interview a female Viet Fed board member, who

regularly attended meetings and actively helped organize
numerous events, described her
community work objective as helping Vietnamese Americans to
find a place to stand in
the US. I find this statement compelling because of the way in
which she connected this
struggle for belonging in US society with an ongoing struggle to
preserve Vietnamese
culture and history, particularly an awareness of ourselves as
[refugees of
communism]. Later in the interview, she says, “
[I know there is a communist
contingent in our community wanting to disrupt (our work)…so
we must try hard to
educate the (Vietnamese American) youth, let them know why
their parents disregarded

105 2004. She works for the Union of Pan Asian Communities
as a health outreach
coordinator for Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian
communities in San Diego. Translation of the
interview transcriptions are my own.
53
all hardships to bring their families here (to the US)].106
Through this statement,
locates one of the many functions of anticommunism in the
Vietnamese
American community. It serves as a pedagogical tool for the
second generation to learn
their parents’ (and community’s) immigration story; about the
sacrifices of the first
generation as a means of understanding the reason they are in

the US.
This immigration story is intimately linked to a model minority
discourse for
Asian American immigrants. My interview with speaks to the
inherent
contradictions of the model minority discourse because of the
expectation that
Vietnamese Americans will be able to (in fact, they deserve to)
find a “place to stand” in
the US after all the sacrifices made by “heroic” Vietnamese
refugees who escaped
communist tyranny. Lisa Sun-Hee Park explains that the
discursive construction of Asian
Americans as the model minority hearkens back to a longer
tradition of the “American
myth of national origins” whereby immigrants escape political
or economic oppression

with little or nothing and ultimately achieve the American
dream. Yet this “patriotic
drama” is truly paradoxical for Asian Americans because
“According to this narrative,
the role of the good Asian American is that of the perpetual
foreigner/victim who must be
rescued, welcomed, and domesticated again and again.”108 In
order to stake a claim to the
US nation-state as the “good immigrants,” Asian Americans
must continually
106 Ibid.
107 Throughout the dissertation, I refer to my interview
subjects by respectful “kinship terms” that my
interviewees and I used during times spent doing community
work as well as while socializing outside of
Vietnamese Federation events. The terms used are either =
“Aunt,” “Uncle” or either aunt
or uncle, but designated for those with more seniority.

108 Park 2008, forthcoming.
54
acknowledge their foreigner status.109 If, like other Asian
immigrants, Vietnamese
Americans have a stake in this model minority myth, how do
their refugee narratives
corroborate or complicate the existing configurations of this
troubling paradigm? I
suggest that anticommunist discourse simultaneously relies
upon and disrupts the model
minority paradigm by asserting the primacy of homeland
concerns and an attachment to a
[refugee] identity. Parallel to Cuban American community and
identity formations

(often considered the model minority of Latino groups),
Vietnamese Americans’ vexed
relationship with their homeland and their tokenization as
deserving refugees in the US
set them apart from their Asian American peers.110 It is, thus,
important to understand
how the refugees themselves make use of anticommunist
discourse in their everyday
practices, and to interrogate how these practices may enable us
to understand the
construction of “refugee” identities beyond state-sanctioned
narratives.
The other issue brought up, the concern that infiltrators are
disrupting the elders’ task to educate Vietnamese American
youth about their history, has
been a recurring theme in a majority of my interviews with Viet
Fed members. The

notion of infiltration, which I initially dismissed as extreme or
paranoid, can
actually be contextualized historically by the US Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s
aggressive campaign in the mid-1990s to recruit Vietnamese
Americans to support their
effort of detecting and capturing communist spies from
Vietnam. In 2005 and 2006, I
109 In Leland Saito’s work on Asian American, Latino, and
white communities in suburban LA, he argues
that certain Asian American groups invoke the “good
immigrant” image which serves to distinguish them
from other racialized minorities and the negative connotations
associated with their communities. See Saito
1998 and 2001.
110 Cheris Brewer Current recently argues that Cuban refugees
have been “ideologically valuable” in the
US during the 1960s and 70s as a means of demonstrating
America’s moral position against communism.

See “Normalizing Cuban Refugees: Representations of
Whiteness and Anti-communism in the USA
During the Cold War,” Ethnicities 8:1(2008): 42-67.
55
received numerous scanned or photocopied documents through
various Vietnamese
community and politics listservs that attempted to re-ignite the
issue about communist
infiltration. I followed these leads and found they were
documents circulated by the FBI
and translated and printed in the leading Vietnamese-language
newspaper,
Daily News in 1996 after President Bill Clinton restored
diplomatic relations with the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In a FBI notice, Vietnamese

refugees are asked to assist
the US government with information:
With the increased number of Vietnamese refugees in the
United States,
we think that the activities of Communist espionage has kept up
the pace
and multiplied vigorously. To prevent this growth, the FBI is
once more
requesting the help of Vietnamese refugees, those who had
relations with,
or who had communicated with the Vietnamese Communist
regime in the
past…If you want to assist the United States Government and
fellow
overseas Vietnamese in eliminating the activities, threats, and
abuses, etc.
by the underground Communist spies, please contact us
immediately.111
In a 1996 article printed in the South China Morning Post, FBI
spokesman George Grotz

is cited as claiming that Vietnamese agents have infiltrated
Vietnamese American
communities in California and Texas, home to a large
contingent of anti-Hanoi activists.
Grotz suggests that these communist spies may be responsible
for the home burglaries,
gang activities, computer chip thefts, and economic espionage
that were of key concern
to the FBI at this particular historical moment.112 Given that
the criminalization of
Vietnamese Americans by US mainstream media’s emphasis on
“food, festivals, and
crime” 113 during the 1980s and 1990s (particularly on gang
activity and home invasions),
111 Thông cáo [Notice] by U.S. Department of Justice, Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Advertisement on
Nguòi Viêt Daily, Saturday, February 17, 1996.

112 Greg Torode, “Visa Bids Delayed by FBI’s Spy Fears” in
South China Morning Post 23 March 1996,
pg. 12.
113 The borrow the triad of “food, festivals, and crime” from
Jeffrey Brody, Tony Rimmer, and Edgar
Trotter’s (2000) study of media representations of the
Vietnamese American community, in which they
56
I suggest that the opportunity to re-cast Vietnamese refugees as
the model minority and
deserving refugee came by way of the FBI’s spy-hunt. If the
Vietnamese refugee
community responded cooperatively, as they did with 200 leads,
they may resist, in some
small measure, the dominant media’s criminalization of their
community.114 Calling out

the “communists,” placing blame on communist infiltrators and
spies, would distance the
“good immigrants” from the undemocratic, un-American enemy
alien presumably hiding
in their midst. This is mutually beneficial for the state and for
Vietnamese refugees, as
subjects of the state, in maintaining democratic ideals and
preserving national affiliations.
Even while Vietnamese refugees are cast as perpetual foreigners
just as previous Asian
immigrants groups, they may express allegiance to their country
of refuge through this
communist spy-hunt. Thus, Vietnamese American
anticommunism can be understood as
a complicated negotiation of political allegiance and social
belonging.115
In many weekly meetings, the concern about “communist

infiltration” has
cropped up when members assess the organization’s strengths
and weaknesses in
programming for the community. During a meeting on
September 1, 2004, the perceived
crisis of communist infiltration was the main agenda item. This
meeting was well-
attended by Viet Fed advisors and concerned delegates in
addition to the regular board
members. That evening, I showed up late to a conference room
filled with first generation
find that a disproportionate number of articles having to do with
Vietnamese Americans focus on one or a
combination of these topics.
114 No arrests were made based upon these anonymous phone
calls/leads, but the targets of community
suspicion were newspaper reporters and community activists.
115 Ngo (1997) argues that “The main actor that has been

supporting, financing and supplying the rationale
for the [Vietnamese American] anti-communist viewpoint has
always been the U.S. government.” In his
conference paper on this topic, he shows how the US
government set up a “Chiêu Hôi Open Arms program
upon the Vietnamese American community [in San Jose]” in
1975 modeled after the one they set up in
Vietnam in the 1960s to persuade to join the US side.
57
men and several women who discussed the growing tension over
the Party, a
group that espouses anticommunist ideals but is often suspected
of being in concert with
During the meeting, I made the following observations:
One of our board members suggest that we need to “fortify” the
community (or protect it) from infringing communist elements.
No names

were explicitly mentioned, but some members made reference to
the
organization called “ .” All members present agree that a
committee needs to be formed to see to this matter, that way the
Viet Fed
will not be directly implicated in any “political interest”
organizing.
Several advisors share their concerns about the growing
contingency of
communists in San Diego, providing the evidence of
“communist
performers” at dinner-concerts given at some local Vietnamese
restaurants. Just last week Trang Restaurant had a “communist
performer.” I want very much to ask why the performer is
labeled a
communist—is it merely because s/he is from Vietnam or does
s/he
espouse Socialist principles through music? But I do not ask,
for fear of
appearing dumb, uninformed, mis-educated by my western
schooling. Or
maybe it’s more about being viewed as a researcher and not
“one of us.”116

In all my community work experience, I was struck by how
elders seemed to
unanimously agree on criteria for judging communists versus
anticommunists at these
venues, but in private conversations with me, I hear a slightly
different version of their
anticommunist politics. Their conversations with me usually
revealed a moderate
position. For example, one elder said to me in a matter-of-fact
way, “I go to protest
because I want to show I care about my community and my
country. I go but I don’t
know if that’s the right way, you know, the best way to do
things because sometimes it
make us look bad too.”117 As a community leader, this elder
was very cautious about
sounding too critical, but it was obvious that he does not always

agree with the hard-line
position of his peers. However, these personal feelings were
usually put aside in the
116 Field Notes 1 September 2004.
117 2006
58
interest of appearing in solidarity against a perceived threat to
their goal of sustaining a
refugee identity. This particular meeting resulted in the
formation of a committee called
[committee for community protection and
development] whose purpose was vaguely discussed as acting as
a watchdog of sorts for
“communist activity.” After several months, the committee

informally disbanded due to a
lack of participation.
The everyday work of anticommunism: “ ” [labor of war]
Community volunteer work has often been described as both a
labor of love and a
form of “ [struggle, battle, fight]” by many first generation
Vietnamese
Americans because of the time, energy, and many personal
sacrifices they must make in
order to serve the greater good as well as the
ideological/political challenges that come
with doing anticommunist community work. This labor comes
with few tangible rewards.
In addition, many members take it upon themselves to finance
some of the organization’s
events out of their own pockets.118 Indeed, the dedication the

elders have to this unpaid
work reveals the ways in which affective structures maintained
during the routine
meetings sustain them in their efforts to strengthen a
Vietnamese American community
and preserve its “cultural integrity.” This cultural integrity has
been contingent on an
anticommunist politics that is part and parcel of the
relationships forged in community
work. That the members all align themselves with South
Vietnam and a refugee identity
allows them to connect deeply and personally with each other
and work together to create
118 Because the Viet Fed does not have a dependable,
continuous source of financial support, each e-board
must creatively find funding outlets through soliciting
donations, putting on fundraising concerts, etc.

However, it is not uncommon for the Viet Fed coffers to be
empty thus making it necessary for members to
use their own resources to fund events. Often, members will not
take reimbursements for money they have
spent on supplies for the Viet Fed.
59
a social space where the hurts of history can be collectively
healed through active
participation and collaboration.
Anticommunism does not just color individual perceptions or
influence individual
actions in the Viet Fed, but rather serves as the common ground
from which to enter into
community work. This is, perhaps, the crux of their attempts to
recruit young people. The

generational difference between “elders” and “youth” for
Vietnamese Americans is more
than just a problem of language and “Americanization.” The
generational difference also
has to do with their first-hand and second-hand memories of
South Vietnam and the war,
and thus their emotional proximity to the twin causes of being
“pro-Vietnam” and
anticommunism. That the membership of the Viet Fed is
comprised of Vietnamese
Americans who are anticommunist is unspoken but widely
accepted. Because of its
history as an organization founded by Vietnamese refugees in
the difficult years
following displacement from the homeland, the Viet Fed has
tacitly become an
anticommunist organization, similar to many other Vietnamese

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