Event Details

Transitive Wars and Racialized Refuge: Temporal Politics at the Limits of the Vietnamese Op-Ed Form and the Syrian Civil War
Tuesday, March 3, 5:00-6:00 pm, Humanities 412 (Interdisciplinary Media Lab)
At the height of U.S. media coverage of the Syrian Civil War from 2014-2018, Vietnamese American op-eds saturated the columns of high-profile presses. In these digitally circulating op-eds, Vietnamese American writers linked the experience of war and its aftermaths across two temporal periods and spatial sites: the Vietnam War (1964-1981) and the contemporary Syrian Civil War (2011-present). Transiting their experience of one war into another, these op-eds use temporality in order to generate vexed meanings of race, war, politics, and justice.

In this talk, I will situate Vietnamese American op-eds about refugees produced out of the Syrian Civil war within the aims of the genre’s form – the rhetorical and affective management of imperial violence in the public sphere. I examine how these op-eds work to absolve the racial violence of imperialism by centering inclusion into the U.S. nation-state as the end goal of historical justice.

I ask, what racisms get elided when these two instances of war become flattened into one? How does mass media recruit Vietnamese Americans into the labor of reproducing of humanitarian violence? What forms of solidarity are foreclosed in these capitalist mediations of mass death? I argue that because of the Vietnamese refugee’s temporal, racial, and libidinal position in the life of U.S. empire, Vietnamese subjects are able to manage, and thereby obscure, the operations of empire at the expense of other, differentially racialized subjects. 

Photo credit Gracey Zhang, NYT