Teaching Vietnamese Vietnam War Stories in the Land of the “Big Red One”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning from an understanding of the American Midwest as the “heartland of Empire,” this article offers a pedagogical case study of teaching two Vietnamese narratives about the Vietnam War—Lê Minh Khuê's 1968 short story “Distant Stars” and Dương Thu Hương's 1991 Novel without a Name—in a predominantly white, pro-military, Midwestern context. Theoretically framed by Viet Thanh Nguyen's explorations of a “just” memory and David Palumbo-Liu's investigations of the “deliverance of others” through literature, this analysis finds that “Distant Stars” and Novel without a Name invite identification with, rather than against, an “enemy combatant,” enact a decentring of the United States and of ethnocentrism, and promote anti-war sentiments. Yet “Distant Stars” and Novel without a Name also need to be followed by a greater ideological challenge to prevent a flattening universalism and avoidance of global accountability. I offer the explicitly anti-American diary of a North Vietnamese field doctor, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, as an effective complement. The first two narratives offer to majoritarian American readers intellectual and homeostatic mechanisms that can avoid the shut-down of offended white privilege; Last Night I Dreamed of Peace can then build on this empathetic foundation to more effectively challenge majoritarian students to engage US contemporary hegemonic militarism and historic global aggression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".