Vietnamese Diasporic Placemaking: An Ethnographic Moment in Uneven Geographic Development

Abstract

The article explores the ways “uneven geographical development” conditions and is conditioned by local placemaking practices. Guided by David Harvey’s work along with Henri Lefebvre’s three dimensions of spatial production— spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation or the “spatial imaginary”—I look at the ways a diasporic community of Vietnamese teachers, students, and parents negotiate heritage language and culture within an urban public elementary school. I hope to illustrate how spatial production works on individuals in ways that produce both docile and self-determining bodies negotiating tensions between unity and difference. I argue that in confining our understanding of the spatial to static backdrops, we limit our abilities to imagine spaces of difference, geographies of desire, places of radical openness and possibility, and third spaces of political opportunity.