a peoples history of empire, or the imperial recuperation of vietnam countermyths and myths in heaven and earth英文精品课件.pdfVIP

Heaven and EarthJournal of Communication Inquiry10.1177/0196859905275241 Matthew A. Killmeier and Gloria Kwok A People’s History of Empire, or the Imperial Recuperation of Vietnam? Countermyths and Myths in Heaven and Earth Using the concept of myth, this essay mounts a diagnostic critique of Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth to interrogate its historical and political significance. The film provides critical correctives to the limited representations of most Hollywood Vietnam War films, contributing to a fuller historical accounting of the war. As a political construction, it contributes to the American recuperation of Vietnam as an object of neoliberal imperialism. The film’s historical and political-economic context suggests that its countermyths are in the ser vice of a new type of intervention by the United States: enclosing Vietnam within the neo- liberal economic Washington consensus. Keywords: Hollywood Vietnam War films; Heaven and Earth; political econ- omy of culture; representation in cinema; imperialism and Vietnam Well, the Oriental does not put the same high value on human life as does the West- erner. Life is plentiful; life is cheap in the Orient; and as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important. —General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds The problem of colonialism includes not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions but also human attitudes toward these conditions.