The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 20 (2009)

Remembering War, Dreaming Peace:On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature

Viet Thanh NGUYEN*I.

INTRODUCTION: COSMOPOLITANISM, COMPASSION, AND LITERATURE

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second timein memory. So it is with what Americans call the “Vietnam War,” and what
Vietnamese call the “American War.” The significance of this war for theUnited States and the way it would be remembered is expressed succinctly in
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prophecy of 1967, in which he said that “if America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’”(Carson 144).1 From the perspectives of many artists working on the war, theAmerican soul was indeed poisoned, but not fatally. It would be art’s task to
perform both the diagnosis and to provide the treatment for the American
body politic, wounded and staggered by its failures in Southeast Asia. The
fact that this treatment would hardly be a cure is borne out by the current
symptoms displayed by the American body politic, its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are telling indicators of a persistent and ongoing American
syndrome, the bellicose urge for violence and domination.
Faced with this syndrome, writers who have remembered the war have
explicitly insisted, or have implicitly shown their readers, that some of thetools of the literary trade are the very same habits of the spirit that the American body politic needs to temper its aggressive disposition. These tools and
Copyright © 2009 Viet Thanh Nguyen. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Associate Professor, University of Southern California

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habits of the spirit are compassion and cosmopolitanism, without which literature would be dead on the page. Human beings who are neither compassionate nor cosmopolitan would appear like some of the characters and authors of such an uninteresting literature, able to imagine only very
circumscribed worlds. Writers fighting the war again in memory have madegreat use of these tools of compassion and cosmopolitanism, with part ofthese writers’ purpose being to illuminate a path to peace for their readers.
This path to peace is an unpaved road whose visibility is dim, whose route isperilous, and whose destination is unknown. Literature’s fitful light provides
us some guidance along this road, so long as we do not overestimate what
literature can do, which is the tendency of writers and literary critics, or underestimate it, which is the tendency of people who do not read literature.
Not surprisingly, King’s prophecy provides a place for literature and thearts, for he says that an autopsy of the American soul is not possible unless
Americans hear the voices of common Vietnamese people, without which
there is “no meaningful solution” (149). Literature is one way of recording,imagining, or transmitting these voices, and literature is one way of preparing
audiences to hear the voices of others. In both cases, what is necessary forboth the writer and the reader is compassion. But compassion and its related
emotions—empathy, sympathy, and pity—are hardly emotions that direct us
or shape our narratives with any political or moral certainty.2 While invoking
compassion may allow us as individuals to feel the pain of others, it may also
facilitate injustice and inequality by permitting us to do nothing as a society
to alleviate that pain (Berlant). For some of compassion’s critics, compassionis always inherently conservative, since our evocations of feeling for theother might really only mean a demand for attention to our own capacity for
sympathy (Edelman; Suttmeier). From this critical viewpoint, our pity for theother’s broken body only reminds us of the wholeness of our own. In thissense, compassion is merely a sign of false consciousness, or even politicalmanipulation as in the slogan from the George H. W. Bush era calling for a“compassionate conservatism,” or in the ways that a “community of compassion” that Americans built for themselves after 9/11 became a “patriotic community” for the purposes of waging war, as Daizaburo Yui argues (71).3
Therefore, when King asks us to hear with compassion the unheard stories
told by Vietnamese voices during the war, we could be excused for being
wary of his religious calling. Perhaps those other voices might simply be
used as choir and chorus for a well-rehearsed American drama telling of how
a house divided between black and white—as well as Left and Right—isnevertheless unified when confronted with foreign threats.

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Nevertheless, a healthy skepticism shouldn’t mean giving up on compassion just yet. While compassion has significant limits in the world of politics
and economics, where sympathy and pity amount to small change indeed, it
has greater currency in the world of art. Here, empathy and sympathy arecompassion’s cousins.4 If sympathy is identifying with someone, then empathy is identifying as someone.5 While sympathy may compel pity and objectification, it may also breed a sense of shared suffering.6 This fellow feeling
may urge us toward action, an urge that empathy may also compel in its ability to make us identify with an other. This empathetic identification may takeplace through our relationship to works of art, particularly those in which wefind “liberal narratives of compassion.” Even here, however, action is notcertain, for these narratives—of which the critic Lauren Berlant considers
Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be typical—ask readers to be witnesses to scenes ofsuffering that may purge readers of the need to take political action, rendering
them passive, except for the pleasure of their emotions, in the face of injustice.7 But compassion is like every technique in an artist’s repertoire, or every
rhetorical trick up a politician’s sleeve. The meanings of these techniques andtricks are not absolute but only evident in use. As Susan Sontag reminds us,“compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or
it withers” (101).
Gesturing toward translation means acknowledging that different translators will render compassion and its cousins in varied ways. When it comes tothe war in Viet Nam and its literary aftermath, what is noticeable is how differently construed these emotions are by the powerful versus the weak; by thewealthy versus the poor; by men versus women. Even emotions are tainted,
or tinged, by our historical and contemporary identities, by our social andeconomic classes. In what follows, I pursue this idea that our feelings not
only have structure, as Raymond Williams argues, but that they have different
styles as well.8 Unifying these differences is the overarching structure andstyle of feeling that give compassion and its related emotions meaning in thelarger world, cosmopolitanism—an endeavor dating back to ancient Greek
efforts to create citizens of the world who would strive for conversations andhuman contact across all kinds of borders. Literature, with its ability to offer
other stories besides the ones that justify war, plays a key role in cosmopolitanism’s efforts to imagine peace and cope with war’s enduring aftermath, its
long half-life in memory.9 Here, in memory, wars remain emotionally radioactive, disfiguring the living well after the cease-fires are signed and theshooting has stopped. Against this disfigurement, and against the state-sponsored machinery of war, cosmopolitanism continues to offer a fragile shelter

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where writers and readers together can plot the long struggle to peace.
II.

COSMOPOLITANISM NOW (AND THEN):
WHAT A DIFFERENCE RACE MAKES

The American War in Viet Nam’s history is retold perhaps most memorably by Hollywood’s cinema-industrial complex, which has waged a campaign of virtual shock and awe in a celluloid Viet Nam. But regardless ofwhether American war stories are cinematic, literary, political, or historical,
the dominant tales are melodramas of traumatized white manhood. These
melodramas of beset manhood substitute the experience of the white malecombat soldier, journalist, or politician for the experiences of the nation andits multitudes. War stories such as these return more than just white American men to center stage; they also reaffirm the dominance of that stage and its
productions as an American one, a theatrical bill accepted by American audiences, American critics, and even American studies. But what if we narrated
the war from the perspectives of those shadowy figures in the wings andbackground of an American production? Would the starring role of “America” be cast differently, and would the drama bear the same name? The war’s
diverse cast was international and multicultural, including American soldiersof color, South Korean soldiers-for-hire, South Vietnamese civilian refugees,
Japanese journalists, American women intellectuals, and many more. Their
oral histories, novels, films, reportage, and photojournalism are war stories
too, together providing vivid evidence for how the war and its aftermath must
be read from a cosmopolitan point of view that broaches the boundaries ofnation, gender, and race.
But since whiteness has been the screen for American film fantasies, I focus here on some of the other colors of the American spectrum, those imprinted on Asian Americans and Latinos. They have long occupied ambiguous places in American society, seen as they are by other Americans asforeigners and strangers. Not surprisingly, Asian Americans and Latinos
have produced war stories that are ambivalent, lashed by conflicting feelingsof patriotism and revulsion. In her book China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
writes of a pacifist brother who must choose between going to Viet Nam andfleeing the United States. He decides that the “United States was the only
country he had ever lived in. He would not be driven out” (283). His is a different kind of war story, not unusual but relatively unknown. Having reluctantly volunteered for the U.S. Navy to avoid the inevitable draft that mightturn him into a combat soldier, the brother spends his tour peacefully, watch-

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ing bombers go on their missions but never having to push the button thatwould release a bomb or fire a missile. Kingston makes it clear that the line
separating a bureaucrat on a ship, pushing papers and a civilian at home going about her or his everyday activities was thin. She writes that whenever“we ate a candy bar, when we drank grape juice, bought bread (ITT makes
Wonder bread), wrapped food in plastic, made a phone call, put money in thebank, cleaned the oven, washed with soap, turned on the electricity, refrigerated food, cooked it, ran a computer, drove a car, rode an airplane, sprayedwith insecticide, we were supporting the corporations that made tanks andbombers, napalm, defoliants, and bombs. For the carpet bombing” (284).
In Kingston’s radical vision, the war is a total one, for in a military-industrial complex, where armed might defends capitalist right, the American civilian serves his patriotic purpose through unquestioning consumption. One
antidote to the civilian’s complicity is, implicitly, the power of the (anti)war
story that Kingston tells about her brother’s passive resistance, which ends
this way: he “had survived the Vietnam war. He had not gotten killed, and hehad not killed anyone” (304). The brother’s story is unlike the typical war
story, whose climaxes involve a soldier’s experience in killing and surviving.
The banality of her brother’s experience is Kingston’s subversive point about
how not all war stories need involve violent, and masculine, action and climax.10
Kingston’s war story is different from the dominant Vietnam War story inother ways too, most noticeably in how she compassionately gestures at theLatino presence in the U.S. Army. Before the war, her brother teaches remedial students, one of whom is Alfredo Campos, a Mexican immigrant who
was going to school to “get a job away from the grape fields” (281). Campos
volunteers for the war, and in the Republic of Viet Nam all of his buddies are“Latins” (282). He has a Vietnamese girlfriend, who wears a leopard miniskirt in the picture he sends home. Kingston’s brother screens a slideshow for
his high school students, Alfredo Campos’s classmates, and I imagine thatwhat they see is Alfredo Campos the tourist and traveler, someone learning
what Paul Gilroy calls “vulgar cosmopolitanism” (67). Vulgar cosmopolitanism is worldliness without a passport, an unlicensed sophistication thatthreatens official representatives of any culture and guards of any border;
vulgar cosmopolitanism is one unintended consequence of the U.S. policy ofshipping poor soldiers of color to fight overseas wars.
While compassion and empathy for the Vietnamese were not always theoutcomes of these soldiers’ time in Viet Nam, a reading of the oral histories
and writings of working-class black and Latino soldiers shows that they were154

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much more likely to feel empathy for the Vietnamese than their workingclass white counterparts (Mariscal; Terry). For white soldiers, empathy for
the Vietnamese was usually a corollary to an already existing tendency toward an elite cosmopolitanism. The most memorable literary incidents ofsuch compassion among U.S. soldiers are found in high literary forms suchas novels, memoirs, and poetry, and even here they are exceptional rather
than normal, written by a handful of highly educated war-veteran authors
such as Tobias Wolff, Robert Olen Butler, Tim O’Brien, and Yusef Komunyakaa. If elite cosmopolitanism is necessary to cross over the racial difference between whites and Vietnamese, then the racial similarity between poor
Americans of color and the Vietnamese was one stimulus for a vulgar cosmopolitanism seeded among the wretched of the earth.11
Aztlan and Vietnam, George Mariscal’s collection of writings by Chicanos
who went to war or who protested at home, illustrates this working-class capacity for a vulgar cosmopolitanism.12 For Mariscal, a “structure of recognition” enables many Chicanas to identify with the Vietnamese, to see in Vietnamese lives a reflection of their own, and to develop a sense of solidarity
with the oppressed racial other. This structure of recognition is a mode of
empathy and compassion that serves to heighten political consciousness
among some Chicanos (39) by providing “a preliminary model for groupsolidarity with important potential for progressive political agendas” (33).
Chicana cosmopolitanism here becomes a kind of chicanery, a tricksterism of
the downtrodden, bred through forced traveling and encounters with an other.
But if some of these soldiers of color recognized in the Vietnamese a kinship based on the hard work of surviving poverty and colonization, others did
a different kind of dirty work by participating in American atrocities, including the My Lai massacre. By doing so, they engaged in what King called the“brutal solidarity” forged between white and black soldiers during the war inViet Nam (143), a fraternity whose rituals of initiation involved both warring
and whoring. What took place on the battlefields and in the brothels of Viet
Nam reminds us that the oppressed of one country can become, with dismaying swiftness, the oppressors in another country. In a telling footnote, Mariscal addresses part of this paradox briefly: he says that perhaps “the Chicano
GI’s recognition of his own situation in the Vietnamese, rather than leading
to a heightened critical awareness, in fact produced exaggerated forms ofviolence. The possible dynamics of self-hatred inherent in this interpretation
are too complex (and unpleasant) for [investigation] here” (311).
But it is precisely this unpleasantness that needs to be investigated. Psy-

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choanalytic critics offer some explanations. Lee Edelman in No Future argues that compassion for an other can spiral into condemnation of that other,and Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture shows how our narcissistic
desire to see the other as someone like us can suddenly force us to do an
about-face, giving in to a paranoid fear of the other’s threat to us. The discovery that the other may neither be like us nor wish to be like us can compel us
to furious violence, “us” being the assumed Western, masculine subject inpsychoanalytic theories ranging from Bhabha’s postcolonial version to
Edelman’s queer take. Even without the Lacanian argument, we could turn toNietzsche’s idea of ressentiment to explain how the weak can turn savagely
on each other, exercising a power otherwise denied to them by the strong.
Narcissistic and paranoid, or seething with ressentiment, the Chicano soldier
and his capacity both to empathize with the Vietnamese and to murder themis hardly surprising, no matter how unsettling.13
Neither is it a surprise how the American conduct of the war in generalpivoted constantly between sympathy and slaughter, expressed, for example,
in the rhetoric of the war, where U.S. policy vacillated between “winninghearts and minds” and establishing “free-fire zones.”14 Compassion turns into
murder, and vice versa, because they are faces of the same coin, one flipped
every time a soldier encounters danger or the perception of danger. Becauseof this unpredictable element of chance and randomness, the individual emotions of compassion and empathy cannot stop the momentum of a war machine. In the chiaroscuro of a battlefield, compassion and empathy dwell
uneasily in both shadow and light. In shadow, compassion and empathy facilitate the killing by making us traumatized witnesses to mayhem; but in themost generous light, compassion and empathy become, instead, the battlefield’s conscientious objectors.
III. AN ARCHITECTURE OF EMPATHY:COMPASSION IN THE MAKING OF ART
The case of two antiwar novels illustrates how compassion and empathy
have more of a fighting chance when wars are fought again in memory.
Takeshi Kaiko’s Into a Black Sun is a semiautobiographical account of aJapanese journalist in Viet Nam during the early years of the American War,and stands as perhaps the greatest novel of the war not usually read by Americans. Ahn Junghyo’s White Badge tells the story of South Korean soldiers
fighting on the American side, their services bought by the U.S. government.
But any kind of Asian racial empathy that might exist between Japanese and156

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South Koreans, on the one hand, and Vietnamese, on the other, does not necessarily lead to peaceful relations. The Japanese were at least partially responsible, during their occupation of Viet Nam in World War II, for a faminethat killed an estimated one to two million Vietnamese.15 Later, during theAmerican War in Viet Nam, South Korean soldiers fashioned a reputation for
brutality so widespread that Vietnamese civilians feared them more than they
did U.S. soldiers. Yet, in both these novels, the portraits of South Vietnamese
civilians and soldiers, who come off poorly in most American accounts, areempathetic. What the novels show is that a useful architecture of empathy iscomposed, as are all structures and styles of feeling, from many elements:
here, a mix of racial and cultural similarity is cemented by political consciousness and reinforced by intellectual and aesthetic cosmopolitanism.
Into a Black Sun illustrates the contradictory uses of compassion and empathy vividly. The narrator of the novel feels like a “hyena feasting on carrion” (61), someone who “had eyes only for atrocities” (71). The key moments
for the narrator are when he witnesses the two public executions of young
men accused of being Viet Cong terrorists. During the first execution, thenarrator identifies empathetically with the executed, and is sickened; but during the second execution, the narrator views the killing with cool objectivity.
The fluctuation between the two moments of spectatorship is the movement
between identifying with the victim or with the victimizer, a move that alsocharacterizes the Japanese public’s relationship to the war in Viet Nam.
Scenes of warfare in Viet Nam provoked significant antiwar sentiment by
reminding the Japanese public of its own status as victim of U.S. warfare andvictimizer of other Asians (Suttmeier). Kaiko’s novel constantly brings up
moments of such identification, as the narrator sees how the Vietnamese now
were so much like the Japanese of World War II, suffering under U.S. bombardment or enduring postwar starvation. But such compassionate identification may only mask the pleasure one finds in witnessing another’s suffering,or obscure the complicity of everyday Japanese in an economy that supported
the American war effort. Kaiko illustrates this problem in an episode inwhich the narrator’s desire to overcome being a spectator leads him to accompany Vietnamese troops into the jungle, where guerillas ambush them.
Here, facing a mortal threat to his life, the narrator discovers that his empathetic connection to the Vietnamese dying around him is inconsequential next
to his own desperate desire for self-preservation.
While Kaiko’s novel focuses on the subjective effects of complicity, foundin viewing scenes of atrocity, poverty, and desperation that are similar to
one’s own past sufferings, White Badge deals not only in a narrator’s com-

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plicity but also a nation’s collusion. Rendering this collusion acidly, the narrator calls U.S. payments to the South Korean government for the use of its
troops “blood money,” which “fueled the modernization and development of
the country. And owing to this contribution, the Republic of Korea, or at leasta higher echelon of it, made a gigantic stride into the world market. Lives forsale. National mercenaries” (40).16 As in Into a Black Sun, the narrator constantly sees in the Vietnamese a visual reminder of his own experience during
the Korean War: “[I]n these people I saw Korea twenty years ago” (53), he
writes, remembering as he does starvation, begging, desperation, and death.
Unlike Kaiko’s narrator, this narrator not only fluctuates between identifying
as victim and victimizer; he is also a killer. His one moment of killing an
enemy soldier terrifies him, requiring him to obliterate the enemy soldierwith hand grenades, the physical equivalent to the way the narrator cannot
identify with the man he is killing (189). Instead, he reserves his identification, in these moments of death, for other Korean soldiers (76). Under pressure of his own possible demise, the narrator, like Kaiko’s narrator, rapidly
runs out of compassion for the Vietnamese and turns to preserving his own
self and those most like him.
The experiences of these Japanese and South Korean narrators show
compassion’s conservativeness. Our empathy for others finds its inspirationin the way these others mirror our selves and move us in their resemblance;
but that movement reaches a limit when the other’s survival threatens ourown self. This conservatism of compassion is, as Bruce Suttmeier argues,
spectatorial. We see the other’s suffering from a distance that allows us to do
absolutely nothing in the world or on the battlefield. And in doing nothing,
we are not only preserving our own self by saving our own lives—we are alsopreserving our own lifestyle. Compassion thus becomes a sly, affective justification for capitalism. The self-interest of the individual and of the corporation that drives capitalist markets is legitimated at least in part by compassion, which renders capitalist desire more palatable by giving it the mask ofaltruism. With this mask on, we can afford to be charitable to the same poor
who may be disenfranchised or rendered superfluous by the capitalism enabling our pity. Compassion thus allows the disavowal of complicity, both forindividuals and nations.17
We shouldn’t forget, however, that for the Vietnamese during wartime, andeven afterward, national interest and self-interest often aren’t even hidden
behind the rhetoric and practice of compassion. If the narrators of White
Badge and Into a Black Sun have the luxury of clothing their self-interest in
garments of empathy, some of the Vietnamese they encounter feel no need to158

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do the same, so naked and abject is their own suffering. In White Badge, aVietnamese elder who leads a village of refugees forcibly displaced by South
Korean soldiers tells the narrator that “[w]e don’t feel a sense of affinity withyou”; this refusal of empathy exists because of the Koreans’ foreign status ina country haunted by a thousand years of foreign occupation (91). But regardless of their status as victims, the Vietnamese should not be exempt fromthe demands of ethical behavior by privileging their own victimization andforgetting their capacity to victimize (Nguyen, “Speak”). The Vietnameseexample reminds us that in looking at victims, or in feeling victimized ourselves, we often wrongly construe compassion and empathy as extravagances,
luxuries from which the suffering are mistakenly and condescendingly excluded by right of their pain.
Imagined as necessary extravagances, however, compassion and empathy
can trim the distance between us and our others in ways that serve ethical,
political, and aesthetic purposes not easily dismissed, particularly in therealm of memory and its reworking through art.18 In both Into a Black Sun
and White Badge, Vietnamese characters are given extensive presence andspeak of their lives and histories in ways rare in American literature. In Intoa Black Sun, for example, the narrator’s Vietnamese translator tells him with
bitterness that “no one really seriously sympathizes with us, because if they
did they couldn’t bear this country for another day” (151). The translator
recognizes the superficiality of the Japanese narrator’s compassion, and how
it literally does not move the narrator enough. But paradoxically, it is theJapanese narrator’s sense of compassion that allows him to depict his own
inadequacy in regard to an other who speaks back to him.19
This other who speaks back shows us that hidden within our compassion is
calculation; this other also shows us that our compassion is embedded within
the neediness of our psyche and the contradictions of our political economy.
Still, despite compassion’s limitations, we can continue to argue that as astyle of feeling, compassion inflects the style of art, itself a luxury no lessneeded. Through these necessary extravagances of compassion and empathy
realized in art, the “America” appearing in these works is not the same“America” evident in American cultural work about Viet Nam. One major
reason why is that the Vietnamese who appear in these Asian novels andAmerican minority reports are not the same Vietnamese who disappear in
American literature. Their appearance demands that our discourse about the
war be transformed from an American monologue into a conversation among
many equals. Even if this conversation does not stop killing or complicity inwartime, it is measurable in its impact on how we talk about a war during its

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aftermath. Kaiko gestures at the importance of such conversation in the biblical verse from Corinthians with which he begins Into a Black Sun: “We see
now through a mirror / in an obscure manner, / but then face to face. / Now I
know in part, but then / I shall know even as I have been known.”20 The promise of compassion and empathy for an other is thus this glimpse of self-consciousness, an always shadowy knowledge that is necessary before the workof recovering from war and constructing peace can begin.
IV.

COSMOPOLITANISM AS A STRUCTURE OF FEELING

But does cosmopolitanism make a difference, and does compassion matter, in the world at large? Do cosmopolitanism and compassion have any effect in leading us toward what Immanuel Kant, in his proposal for cosmopolitanism, calls “perpetual peace”? In understanding the possibilities andlimits of cosmopolitanism, looking toward the suggestive and elusive comments of Williams about structures of feeling becomes helpful. A structure offeeling is “a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet
recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating,” often expressed earliest in art and literature (131–32). The structuraldimension of feeling reminds us that emotions such as compassion are produced socially. As a result, feeling is never simply individual, and it is neverunique. But since we may take our feelings to be only our own, their structural dimension remains “at the very edge of semantic availability” (134),even though it is the very thing that would connect us to others and make us
feel at home with them. The new “semantic figures” of these structures must
be reinterpreted by a later generation of critics, who can offer “explanations
but now at a reduced tension: the social explanation fully admitted, the intensity of experienced fear and shame now dispersed and generalized” (134).21
Artists, too, offer these explanations retrospectively, as the case of Clint
Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima makes evident, which was able to bemade only some sixty years after the end of World War II, when American
feelings against the Japanese had subsided enough to find an audience. Fromthe perspectives of artists, critics, and audiences, then, cosmopolitanism isfundamentally important, a structure that allows individual feelings to connect to shared social feelings through a work of art, primarily through theemotional mechanism of compassion.
But cosmopolitanism also has another structural dimension built in withthe aesthetic, found in the political, and it is here that much of the controversy around cosmopolitanism, and the usefulness of compassion, is found.

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The critics of cosmopolitanism have amassed a powerful set of objections,for even if cosmopolitanism can cultivate within us a greater compassion forothers and strangers, many doubt that it can compel us to action in meaningful structural ways beyond the individual because of the following reasons:cosmopolitanism imagines a world citizen, which is impossible without aworld state; even if such a world state existed, it would in effect be a totalitarian order since there would be no competing power to check it; cosmopolitanism underestimates the enduring power of nationalism and the nation-state
in determining cultural identities, political rights, and economic benefits;cosmopolitanism is an abstraction that cannot compel real love or compassion, which must be rooted in the visceral attachments of people to the local,
not the global; cosmopolitans are rootless people with no loyalty, more inclined to love humanity in the abstract than people in the concrete; cosmopolitanism is Western in origin and not easily transposed to non-Western societies, which may in fact be utterly opposed to cosmopolitanism’s global
ambitions and belief in individual rights and liberties; cosmopolitanism has
no philosophy of solidarity, necessary for mobilizing political alliances that
could struggle for a cosmopolitan vision of the world; some of the diasporic,
mobile, migrant peoples that cosmopolitanism favors are actually committed
to the global capitalism that cosmopolitanism disavows; and cosmopolitan
literature may do more to enhance the reputations and profits of cosmopolitan
writers than to help the poor or exotic populations whose stories populate theliterature.22
Given the realities of a world dominated by the World Trade Organization,
the G8, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Google, the Hollywood film industry, and so on, most of them led and staffed by fairly cosmopolitan people, the kind of cosmopolitan sensitivities I have been describing here in the act of writing and reading literature seem fairly anemic. The
cosmopolitan’s sympathy for strangers may do more to pleasure the cosmopolitan than to change the deep structures of inequality that make cosmopolitan travel, conversation, and consumption possible for certain classes ofpeople, including the managerial elites of global political and financial organs. Even the literary and cultural critic Elaine Scarry argues that the idealsof cosmopolitanism can only be meaningful if they are enacted beyond therealm of education, culture, and the aesthetic, in institutions that have political, economic, and legal impact on people’s lives. The test for “imaginative
consciousness,” she writes, is not a “pleasurable feeling of cosmopolitan largesse” but a “concrete willingness to change constitutions and laws”—anabsolutely correct argument, and one that follows on Kant’s proposal to use a

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federation of cooperating nations to ensure peace (105). But Scarry is one of
the more generous critics of cosmopolitanism, for, in recognizing its limits,
she nevertheless also argues that works of the imagination have a role in expanding human consciousness. Still, she marks those limits very clearly
when she says that “the human capacity to injure other people is very great
precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small” (103).
Even with great works of art, in other words, actual social change rarely follows, for the boulder of our selfishness is too heavy to be budged by art’s lever. Art and literature, as representatives of peace, simply do not have enoughpower to transform the world, or so the anticosmopolitan argument goes, stating, essentially, that cosmopolitanism is too much about individual feelingand not enough about social structure.
These serious and valid criticisms indicate the weaknesses and limits ofcosmopolitanism, but they do not invalidate cosmopolitanism altogether, unless we insist on some diametrical opposition between “abstract” cosmopolitanism and something like “concrete” patriotism or nationalism. As the debate around Martha Nussbaum’s polemic on behalf of cosmopolitanism inher essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” suggests, patriotism and cosmopolitanism are like other seemingly diametrical opposites, deeply dependent on each other despite their evident antagonism.23 Without love of one’s
own country, one cannot love the countries of others; and without the love ofhumanity, the love for one’s own kind appears shriveled. But since the love ofhumanity seems to be in much shorter supply than the love we feel for ourown kind, cosmopolitanism has the advantage of urgency and priority as we
look for ways to cultivate peace. Without cosmopolitanism’s demand to empathize with others who are not like us—to see oneself as another, and theother as oneself—we are left with a dangerously circumscribed empathy,
which does have a political use and a structural impact. This is evident in
President Jimmy Carter’s assertion that the war in Viet Nam enacted “mutual
destruction” on both countries. Mutual here implies equal, an equation that
we can accept only if we ignore the vastly unequal damage inflicted on thepeople, landscapes, and economies of the United States and Viet Nam, not tomention Cambodia and Laos.24 Demanding equal empathy for American pain
and restricting American empathy for Vietnamese suffering, Carter avoided
delivering to Viet Nam the aid it needed—and was promised by the U.S.
government in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973—to recover from war. Thisequation of mutual destruction shows how compassion and empathy can beused in art and politics to render us all equally human in ways that ignore how
we are not equal in terms of our capacity to inflict suffering on others. If

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compassion and empathy circumscribed by nationalism can have a politicaland economic impact, then why can’t compassion and empathy unleashed bycosmopolitanism have an impact as well?
The answer from cosmopolitanism’s critics would be that nationalist empathy has a vehicle for harnessing emotion, namely, the nation-state, while
cosmopolitan empathy has no such structure to turn compassion into action.
Yet the necessity of grounding cosmopolitanism on the soil of real places,
locales, and nations has already taken place in partnership with nationalism.
For better or for worse, the version of cosmopolitanism proposed by Kwame
Anthony Appiah recognizes the limitations placed on actually existing cosmopolitanism in a troubled world whose politics are often dictated by anticosmopolitans. On the one hand, the idealistic aspect of cosmopolitanism
values the importance of conversation with strangers, in which conversation
is “a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others”(85). On the other hand, he says that “there are limits to cosmopolitan tolerance . . . we will not stop with conversation. Toleration requires a concept of
the intolerable” (144). Appiah never mentions exactly how tolerant cosmopolitans will deal with the intolerable, although we might assume that it takes
the form of what Gilroy calls an “armored cosmopolitanism” (59–60), onethat not only confronts “terror” but also resurrects the imperial mission of
benevolent conquest. The quaint idea of the “White Man’s burden” in civilizing the world can become retailored for a new age as an armored, neoliberal
cosmopolitanism, much better suited for culturally sensitive capitalists in theservice of dominating nations like the United States and global entities likethe World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund.
Although cosmopolitanism’s exploitation by nationalism and capitalism
may invalidate it for some, perhaps this exploitation is actually a sign ofhope, for if the powerful can take up cosmopolitanism, it must mean that
cosmopolitanism is useful politically, contrary to what its critics have argued.
Without overstating the case for cosmopolitanism, literature, or art, and while
acknowledging the necessity of changing laws, policies, and institutions, I
find it clear that cosmopolitanism as a feeling is required in order to makechanges in structures. Just as warfare needs patriotism, the struggle for peaceneeds cosmopolitanism to provide the imagination for a utopian future. Without such an imagination and without the expansive deployment of compassion beyond the borders of our own kin, we are resigned to the world we haveinherited, one that we are in danger of destroying through self-interested
habits of aggression and heedless consumption. Even a theorist as resolutely
materialist and revolutionary as Gayatri Spivak argues for the “supplementa-

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tion of collective effort by love,” and the “mind-changing one-on-one of responsible contact” (340), both of which are part of the cosmopolitan creed ofcompassion and conversation. Spivak reconfigures cosmopolitanism’s urge
for intimacy, the need to put distant people in touch with one another in thename of revolutionary solidarity. But since the ability to travel and to meet
distant others is not available to all, cosmopolitanism makes a difference
when it brings us closer in the imagination to distant others. Our structure offeeling in this case is imaginary, but no less potent, for at least in some cases,
people may prefer to know each other from a distance than in proximity (andconversely, physical intimacy may only breed contempt, and worse). In thiscontext, Nussbaum’s defense of art’s political and social purpose is convincing, when she says that art, particularly narrative art, facilitates a “cosmopolitan education” that allows us to see others empathetically and to see
ourselves from the other’s perspective (6).
This cosmopolitan education works not just in direct encounters withworks of art, great and small, and not just in schools, where art is used forpedagogy. In fact, cosmopolitan education works environmentally, seeping
into our minds and our emotions through a set of assumptions that our own
cultures have created about which other cultures are civilized and human. An
average American need never have gone to England or to a university toknow Shakespeare’s name and hence to feel, however dimly, a human connection with English culture. Even American tendencies against intellectuals,
the elites, and the French would not prevent an average American from feeling that the French have done something worth being saved (or so I hope). In
the absence of this cosmopolitan education about certain others that is enacted upon the student (in the classroom) and the citizen (through mass culture), a vacuum is created in the human soul when it comes to those others
who are not represented in a given society’s cosmopolitan education. Those
who are not represented are more likely, in times of war, to be subjected to aviolence whose ferocity is far bloodier than that practiced upon enemies weconsider to be more human and capable of cosmopolitanism. Violence can bemeasured and violence can be tempered, and cosmopolitan education is fundamental to limiting violence upon those we see as closer to us on the humanscale, and justifying ever-greater torrents of violence upon those we see as
further away on the animal horizon.
We can measure our cosmopolitan sympathies for others, and the degree towhich we have been educated about them, via the bomb test. How manybombs are we willing to drop? Where will we drop them, and on whom?
What kinds of bombs will we use? Much has been made of how the United

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States dropped more bombs on Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos during theAmerican War than were dropped on all of Europe during World War II, andhow the total tonnage and indiscriminate bombing of soldiers and civilians
alike was a measure of the war’s brutality. This brutality would not have beenpossible if Americans were not already predisposed to consider Southeast
Asians as inhuman. Another bomb test is, obviously, the nuclear one. In The
English Patient, the novelist Michael Ondaatje depicts the atomic bombing ofHiroshima as a racially motivated event, at least from the perspective of oneof his characters, the Indian sapper Kip, a colonized subject and a soldier inthe British Army, whose hazardous specialty is defusing unexploded bombs.
Hearing of the atomic bomb’s detonation, Kip has a flash of understanding:the bomb would never have been dropped on a white country. For Kip, theharsh illumination provided by the bomb begins his decolonization throughhis recognition of the racism in Western civilization that allows Western technology to be used against non-Western people. As a novel, The English Patient both depicts what happens when one culture does not recognize anotherculture as equally human and is, itself, as a novel, an artistic artifact, evidence
against the underlying logic of Eurocentric racism, one strand of which is thebelief that only whites can write. The English Patient is an example to prove
Kingston’s claim in her Fifth Book of Peace that “war causes peace” (227)
through producing revulsion on the part of war’s witnesses, who lead not
only antiwar movements but also write antiwar literature.
Still, writing back against racism, empire, and war, as Ondaatje does, takes
place not on the universal scale but on the intimate scale of the individual
artist and work. Without these individual artists and works, cosmopolitan
education on a universal scale cannot take place. Yet the criticism of cosmopolitanism advanced by Scarry points to the inadequacy of individual works
of art and how rare it is to find one that enacts significant change, such as
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. My suspicion is that many people share Scarry’s view, although with a less generous
spirit than she has, about art. Those suspicious people who do not read literature may be skeptical about whether it has any purpose or use, questions notnormally directed toward the law or business or government. But does theaverage lawyer or businessperson or bureaucrat make more difference, inflict
more damage, or do more good than the average writer? The average writerand the average book need to be measured against their equivalents, averagepeople in average jobs, not against daunting standards of making a universal
difference or changing the world. Against such high standards, most of us
would count as failures, too, not just the average work of art or the average

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obscure writer. So let the midlist novelist be compared to the vice presidentof a regional bank; let Shakespeare be compared to Bill Gates; let the novel
be compared to the computer; let cosmopolitan education be compared towar. Only with the appropriate comparisons can we say whether art, and thecosmopolitan impulse to see art as a means to peace, makes a difference. As
Kingston also writes in The Fifth Book of Peace, “peace has to be supposed,
imagined, divined, dreamed” (61); this kind of dreaming will not happen
without cosmopolitanism and its persistent, irritating reminder that it is easier to wage war than to fight for peace.
V.

CONCLUSION: COMPULSORY EMPATHY AND THE ENEMY’S VOICE

Without cosmopolitanism’s call for an unbounded empathy that extends toall of humanity, we are left with nationalism’s compulsory empathy, enacted
in its own structures of feeling. For contemporary American audiences, “TheVietnam War” names a structure of feeling that tunes out empathy for theother and helps Americans to forget that “Viet Nam” is the name of a country,
not a war. This structure of feeling called “The Vietnam War” is expressed
through art most affectively in the Hollywood subgenre called the Vietnam
War movie, exemplified in films like The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now. These films individually demand empathy for the U.S. soldiers
who are the protagonists of their narratives. Collectively, though, the films
create a system of compulsory empathy imposed on American audiences asa whole, in two ways. First, audiences are compelled to empathize with theUnited States since these soldiers and their suffering—both as victims andvictimizers—stand in for the emotional, cultural, and psychic devastation
wreaked on the United States by the war. Of course, not every American will
feel the same degree of empathy toward American experiences, and someAmericans will resist empathizing with these films. But compulsory empathy
works even more effectively in a second, negative fashion, by providing
American audiences few other options for empathy besides the stories featuring Americans. In the absence of stories or news featuring others, the moral
imagination of Americans is inevitably stunted, since a compulsory system
offers very limited alternatives to the thing that it makes normal. Thus, if one
is not straight in a regime of compulsory heterosexuality, one risks being labeled a queer; if one does not feel for American experiences in a system ofcompulsory empathy, one skirts with charges of betrayal, as was the case in
the early years after 9/11. In that climate, it was both outrageous and courageous for the novelist Barbara Kingsolver to publish an article only days after

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9/11 in which she both mourned for its victims and reminded her fellow
Americans that bombings of that scale were hardly unusual and that Americans were often responsible for them. “Yes, it was the worst thing that’s happened, but only this week,” she wrote. “Surely, the whole world grieves for us
right now. And surely it also hopes we might have learned, from the taste of
our own blood . . . that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.”Kingsolver’s perspective is possible because she refuses the compulsory
empathy of nationalism, remembering the plight of others who have beenbombed and seeing the United States from their anguished eyes, in a way thatrecalls another portion of King’s speech on Viet Nam: “[H]ere is the true
meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see
the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment ofourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of ourown condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit fromthe wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition” (151). King labels
the other not as a stranger or a foreigner, as is the tendency in most versionsof cosmopolitanism, but as the enemy, a word that compels us to ponder how
we use violence upon the enemy, and the violence with which the enemy
threatens us. Turning to the enemy’s perspective is a crucial step in eradicating the sentimentalism and idealism that weakens cosmopolitanism, for sucha move reminds us that the other is not likely to see us from a generously
compassionate point of view. Indeed, the other—the enemy, the terrorist—islikely to be subject to his or her own version of compulsory empathy. In order
to arrive at any hope of a compassionate conversation, cosmopolitanism must
therefore negotiate between competing systems of compulsory empathy produced from communities demanding attention to their own grievances. Appiah and Nussbaum underestimate the difficulty of achieving such a conversation by forgetting to remind us how histories of violence and inequity
render entry into these conversations so difficult for women, the colonized,
and the minority. Shut out from these conversations, these populations may
turn to violence in order to speak. Appiah calls such gestures anticosmopolitan intolerance, and so they may be in some cases, but in other cases some
may feel that violence is the only tolerable alternative in order to confront
unjust power. Understanding that our enemies are motivated not only by hatred but also by compassion and empathy—in other words, by love—allows
us to understand the partial and prejudiced nature of our own compulsory
emotions.
The recent publication of Nhật Ký Ðặng Thùy Trâm (the Diary of Dang
Thuy Tram) provides me with a concluding example of the complexities in-

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volved in hearing the enemy’s voice. Dang Thuy Tram was a young North
Vietnamese doctor who served in South Viet Nam during the American War
and who was killed by U.S. troops in 1970, at the age of twenty-seven. She
kept a diary of her two years of service, which was recovered by a U.S. military intelligence officer, Frederick Whitehurst, who kept it for decades before
he found the chance to return it to Tram’s family in 2005. Her diary was published in Viet Nam later that year and sold some 430,000 copies in a country
where the average print run is one to two thousand copies. Critics have attributed the phenomenal success of her diary to the idealistic, romantic, vulnerable personality on display, the readiness of a postwar generation to revisit a war that many young Vietnamese do not remember and do notunderstand, and the willingness of the government to allow a wider discussion of the war than via the propagandistic terms set in the past.25 The epic
story of the diary’s disappearance and reappearance also played a part in thebook’s marketability and its eventual translation into over a dozen languages,
including Japanese (with the title Tuii no Nikki). For the English version,Tram’s family and the publisher selected the title Last Night I Dreamed ofPeace, extracted from two occasions in the diary in which she mentions
dreaming of peace (27, 111). In the United States, the title of the book has
helped to shape its marketing and reception, as a book that offers hope forpeace and the reconciliation between enemies. In reading the book, however,what becomes noticeable is not the desire for a reconciliation between enemies—in fact, there is no such desire, only “hatred” as “hot as the summersun” (114) for the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries—but for a peace thatarises from victory and the defeat of the enemy, whom she calls “bandits”(74), “vicious dogs” (83), and “bloodthirsty devils” (47), and against whom
she dreams not of peace but of revenge for all whom they have killed.26 Whatis a cosmopolitan to make of this enemy’s voice?
While the publisher’s framing of the book as a call for “peace” steers theaudience’s reading in a certain direction—and demonstrates that “peace” canbe turned into a commodity as much as war—my suspicion is that the diary’s
power for American readers comes not so much from the gestures at peace
but from the highly recognizable narrative of compulsory empathy offered byTram of herself. What is memorable about her is the depth of her compassionate feeling for her patients, her comrades, and her fellow Vietnamese.
“It’s not my love for a certain young man that makes me feel and act the way
I do,” she writes. “This is something immense and vibrant within me. My
longings extend to many people. . . . What am I? I am a girl with a heart
brimming with emotions” (96). The diary is a vivid record of her willingness

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to sacrifice youth, romantic love, and even her own life for the revolution, heraffections for the “brothers” that she adopts among her comrades (and theirmore romantic ardor for her), her fear of being misjudged by other revolutionaries, her contempt for the petty politics and jealousies that exist evenamong members of the Communist Party, and her struggles with what she
depicts as her bourgeois inclinations. Her diary makes clear that romantic
love and revolutionary love share the same roots, as does compassion for
one’s comrades and compassion for the nation. Of a soldier who has justdied, she writes that “your heart has stopped so that the heart of the nation canbeat forever” (83), while she describes feeling that she and her adopted brothers share “a miraculous love, a love that makes people forget themselves andthink only of their dear ones” (86). But in the same entry that describes how
she is “profoundly compassionate” toward her wounded comrades, she alsomentions “American bandits” (104). The model of emotion she offers istherefore not so different from the very one that Kingsolver criticizes, thedeep feeling for one’s own that is shored up by hatred for the other in theservice of harnessing individual empathy for the greater cause of patriotic
war. As Tram says, “this diary is not only for my private life. It must also
record the lives of my people and their innumerable sufferings, these folks ofsteel from this Southern land” (158).
An American audience’s ability to extract sentiments of peace from Tram’sdiary is possible not in spite of the hatred for Americans on display but because of it; ironically, Tram’s patriotic hatred for Americans is understandable to Americans who have patriotically hated others in the present and thepast. But it is also the passage of time that makes American audiences willing
to reconcile with an enemy from the past, to recognize in the enemy’s sentiments of love and hatred a set of twinned emotions felt by Americans as well.
But so far as American audiences are indeed in search of reconciliation with
their former Vietnamese enemies, what does “peace” mean? Does it mean
simply getting over a war, or recognizing that the struggle to end current andfuture wars continues? King’s analysis of the war in Viet Nam is again prescient when he connects his present of 1967 to our present, saying:[T]he war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality . . . we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will
be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand
and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We
will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without

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end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life. (156)

The war in Iraq, of course, constitutes the present from which we look backtoward Viet Nam. Thus, in reading Tram’s diary in an American context today, the English title—Last Night I Dreamed of Peace—might provoke a
cosmopolitan feeling on the part of readers, a sense that we should be able toreconcile with our current enemies if we can do so with our former enemies.
So it is that the English title of the diary, as inaccurate as it is in foregrounding a relatively insignificant theme in Tram’s writing, nevertheless signals ahope for a broader peace than the one Tram imagined.
But the fact that we are still at war forty-one years after King’s speech andthirty-eight years after Tram’s last words may mean that the compassion
called for by King is inadequate; or it may mean that the compassion called
for by King, one which inspires nonviolence rather than violence, never truly
came into existence. After all, our efforts to speak of the war in Iraq are still
inadequate and inarticulate, and at least one major reason why is the paucityof Iraqi stories. Invoking the voices of enemies, others, or strangers is hardly
innocent or unproblematic, as numerous critics have shown and any study of
the American demand for Vietnamese voices will make evident. Nevertheless, the presence of those voices and the problems they articulate are preferable to their absence and erasure. Complicating the task of attending to thosevoices is the ongoing work of understanding our place in past and present
structures of feeling. For Williams, a structure of feeling in its own present
exists “at the very edge of semantic availability,” which in retrospect may beseen as part of a “significant (often in fact minority) generation” (134). Looking back to the war in Viet Nam and the stories that have emerged from it,
what we witness are a minority of authors using cosmopolitanism and compassion both to challenge American representations of the Vietnamese and tocall for a peaceful alternative to the American War. If the call for peace bythese authors is oftentimes inarticulate, it is because it is uttered like the samecall today, in what Gilroy calls a state of “hopeful despair” (75), an apt description of cosmopolitanism itself. In this fragile structure of feeling that iscosmopolitanism, peace exists, but only on the edge of semantic availability,
on the tips of our tongues.
NOTES
1
Throughout this article, I will normally use the word “Viet Nam,” which is how thecountry’s name is written by the Vietnamese. When I use “Vietnam” or “the Vietnam War,”these words denote the American point of view on Viet Nam. My thanks go to audiences at

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Texas Tech University, Ohio State University, Rikkyo University, and Harvard University forquestions and comments that helped me to refine my arguments, and to Yuan Shu, Frederick
Aldama, Nicholas Donofrio, Adena Springarn, and Lawrence Buell for arranging some ofthese talks.
2
Woodward discusses this cluster of emotions as a quartet found in the works of four scholars who have written on compassion: Lynne Henderson, Martha Nussbaum, Elizabeth
Spelman, and Lauren Berlant.
3
In the Bush case, compassion becomes a nickname for the hypocrisy and self-interest ofa state that would rather spend emotions than money on behalf of the poor. Critiques of compassionate conservatism are leveled by Woodward and Berlant.
4
Marjorie Garber has this to say about empathy: it denotes “the power of projecting one’s
personality into the object of contemplation and has been a useful technical term in both psychology and aesthetics. It seems possible that the need for this word arose as the strongest
sense of sympathy began to decline or become merged with compassion. But empathy also
seems to stress the matter of personal agency and individual emotion. A person who displays
empathy is, it appears, to be congratulated for having fine feelings; a person who shows or
expresses sympathy has good cultural instincts and training; a person who shows compassion
seems motivated, at least in part, by values and precepts, often those learned from religion,
philosophy or politics” (24).
5These distinctions between sympathy and empathy come from Song (87–90).
6
Garber, in tracing the etymology of sympathy and empathy, differs from Song when she
points to another connotation of sympathy and its complications for our understanding ofcompassion. While compassion implies inequality, charity, or patronage in the relationshipbetween the nonsufferer and the sufferer, sympathy implies equality or affinity “whether between the body and the soul, between two bodily organs, or, increasingly, between persons
with similar feelings, inclinations, and temperaments” (23). The equality or affinity implied bysympathy leads to sympathy’s creation of a sense of fellow feeling and suffering together thatis absent in compassion’s establishment of a distance between the witness to suffering and theperson who suffers.
7
This, Woodward argues, is Berlant’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Woodward
calls the “ur-text” for what she defines as “liberal narratives of compassion.”
8
Williams’s chapter in Marxism and Literature on “Structures of Feeling” is more suggestive than exhaustive. He does gesture briefly at the relation of “differentiated structures offeeling to differentiated classes” but does not explore how different classes may have different
feelings. Besides class, the only other form of differentiation to feeling that he discusses isgenerational.
9
Concerning storytelling and peace, Gayle Sato argues that “it is the process of narrative
reenactment—a process of returning to the same ground to remember and retell it yet articulate it anew each time, a process that creates an incremental and always partial narrative recovery of the past—that contains the possibility of an ethical, community-building practice of
pacificism” (114).
10
Kingston revisits her brother’s experiences in The Fifth Book of Peace, a book that mixes
fiction and nonfiction as it structurally defers action and climax. While there is much to praise
about The Fifth Book of Peace, I focus on “The Brother in Vietnam” because I prefer the way
it articulates Kingston’s concerns about the systemic nature of war in a much more condensed
fashion.
11
Komunyakaa is the only nonwhite writer in this group. I include him here to emphasize
how cosmopolitanism, class, and whiteness are usually aligned among American veteran authors; Komunyakaa is the exceptional African American author who proves the rule that
dominant stories of the war are usually told by white men.

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12
Two conventions regarding gender difference within the category of “Chicano” are to use“Chicana/o” or “Chican@.” Following a third convention, I prefer to alternate between Chicanas and Chicanos.
13“Seething” is the adjective that Wendy Brown uses in her explanation of how Nietzschean
ressentiment affects the weak, who are subject to “slave morality.”
14
The catch-22 of American attitudes is expressed most infamously, but perhaps apocryphally, by the American major who said, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order tosave it.” The quotation was reported in February 1968 in the New York Times by Peter Arnett,
but corroboration of the quotation has apparently been difficult to make.
15
Havens gives a figure of “at least one million” and briefly notes Vietnamese resentment ofJapanese occupation. Karnow gives the figure of two million (144). Elliott mentions the roleof the colonial government in forcing peasants to turn over rice for the Japanese Army, which
hoarded food supplies during the famine (107).
16
Suk-Young Hwang’s novel The Shadow of Arms reinforces this sense of unacknowledgedcommerce at the heart of war, in its depiction of South Koreans, South Vietnamese, Vietnamese Communists, and Americans all participating ruthlessly in the black market during thewar.
17
Even in the case of American studies, the power and paradox of compassion is sometimes
at work. Compassion is evident in the theoretical work of American studies that argues for thefield being more empathetic to the nation’s others, both those within national borders andoutside of them (Friedensohn; Kerber; Kessler-Harris; Rowe). But compassionate representation in these multicultural or international guises risks being merely additive, both at the levelof institutional practice and at the level of research. Even as we include different faces anddifferent bodies in our structures of feeling and of thinking, those structures themselves, suchas the university, the department, or the field, may not change. (See Desmond and Dominguez
and Lee for the dangers of an “international” American Studies that is still American centered.
The critiques of an additive multiculturalism are numerous, including those of Lowe andChow). In this sense, compassion is again conservative, preserving an “America” in American
studies that is ever more diverse and inclusive, but one whose democratic vistas are nevertheless stamped as American property.
18
I borrow the dialectic of necessity and extravagance from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior and Sau-ling C. Wong’s critical appropriation of that dialectic to describe theworkings of Asian American literature.
19
The textual strategy here reminds me of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s postcolonial third world
feminist approach to the ethics of writing and representation in Woman Native Other, one thatis also presumably influenced by the history of Viet Nam and the American War: “I write toshow myself showing people who show me my own showing. I-You: not one not two” (22).
20
1 Corinthians 13.12, from the Revised Challoner-Rheims Version (Confraternity), Guild
Press 1941. The King James version, perhaps the best known, is “For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am
known.”
21
The preceding section of this paragraph on Williams is drawn from Nguyen 2008.
22
The commentary on cosmopolitanism is extensive. For a few sources, see Appiah, Archibugi, Brennan, Cheah and Robbins, Clifford, Derrida, Douzinas, Gilroy, Hollinger, Kant,
Kaplan, Nussbaum, Srikanth, and Vertovec and Cohen.
23
See the essays in Nussbaum.
24
For example, some 3,000,000 Vietnamese died during the war, compared to a little morethan 58,000 Americans; and some 300,000 Vietnamese remain missing, compared to a little
over 2,000 Americans. The United States was never, of course, bombed.
25
See the essays by Fox, Vo, and Vuong.

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26
The quotations are drawn from the English edition of the diary, although I have crosschecked these translations with the original Vietnamese edition.

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