Maguire, Mark
(2004)
On the Other Side of the Hyphen: Vietnamese-Irish Identity.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
In August 1979 the first of a small number of refugees from Vietnam
arrived in Dublin. They came to Ireland via camps in Hong Kong and Malaysia
with harrowing tales of escape and of long periods of travel across the South
China Sea. These were the so-called ‘Boat People’, whose plight was captured
in newspaper headlines from the late 1970s onwards. Those who came to
Ireland—some 212 persons in the first instance—were invited to do so by the
Irish Government. Religious and non-governmental organisations carried out
much of the resettlement work, however. The majority of the refugees were
dispersed to a variety of locations throughout Ireland, from Tralee and Portlaoise
to Cork City. In the early 1980s most re-migrated to Dublin.
This is the story of the Vietnamese-Irish, of takeaway businesses,
achievement in education, family, diaspora and identity. Much of this story is
told in the words and through the eyes of the people themselves. What emerges
is an ethnographic portrait of a minority confronting its own identity in a fastchanging
Irish society. This thesis is an exploration of Vietnamese-Irish identity.
In order to explore identity for this small, yet heterogeneous and widely
dispersed minority, my emphasis has been on a number of ‘sites’, such as
education, work and homes. Theoretically, I explore spatial dimensions of
identity in detail, as well as arguing against current approaches to migration and
minority life in Ireland.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Hyphen; Vietnamese-Irish; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology |
| Item ID: |
5211 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
24 Jul 2014 08:31 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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