The Rhetorical Making Of A Personhood: A Vietnamese Woman\u27s Journey Into Literacies And Subjectivities

In the form of an autoethnography, an examination of the private troubles of individuals and their connection to public issues and to public responses to those troubles (Denzin viii), this Dissertation demonstrates the impact of a country\u27s history on its people\u27s lives. According to Bourdieu\u27s theory, changes in field trigger changes in habitus and capital; this interrelatedness offers an epistemological and methodological approach to a historicized and particular understanding of social life (Thomson 81). From an eyewitness\u27 perspective, this writer/ethnographer narrates her stories/experiences in Viet-Nam and in America to shed light on her cultural and linguistic struggles, her transitions through endurance, and her individual perseverance as a Vietnamese baby boomer immigrant in American society and especially in academia. While stories/experiences are personal, the historical background is not. This work contributes to the field of Rhetoric and Composition by introducing a voice/a writing that belongs to the Vietnamese baby boomer immigrants whose displacement experiences-- social, academic, and personal-- have not been heard as a voice of the first generation, in the first-person singular pronoun