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TO REMEMBER
Invoking history in memorials, the photographic image, and poetry
Sunday, May 3rd
2:00PM to 4:00PM
Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA)
1600 N. Broadway, Suite 210, Santa Ana, CA 92706
(Park on 3rd level of parking structure)
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, this community event brings together research and creative work to think about the affect and politics of memory. Yen Le-Espiritu (UCSD) will speak on "Vietnamese Refugee Remembering and Remembrance," Nguyen-vo Thu-huong (UCLA) on "The Irreconcilable Past: Photographic Memory as Historical Tragedy," and Cara Le (UCLA) will read from her collection of stories and poems called The Labor of Longing. Discussion will follow.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association, and the UCSD Ethnic Studies Department, this event is free and open to the public.
SPEAKERS
Yen Le-Espiritu
Vietnamese Refugee Remembering - and Remembrance
Exploring the link between space, identity, and collective memory, and the process and politics of remembering the Vietnam War from the vantage point of the Vietnamese diasporic community, this talk will shown how Vietnamese Americans have used Internet memorials and commemorative street names to literally write their histories into the American landscape. Challenging the "good refugee" narrative, I will argue that "anti-communist" practices constitute highly complex and contingent commemoration efforts to counter an erasure of the history of the Republic of Vietnam, both in Vietnam and in the United States.
Originally from Vietnam, Yen Le-Espiritu is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has published widely on Asian American panethnicity, gender and migration, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. Her most recent book is Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (University of California Press, 2014).
Nguyen-vo Thu-hunng
The Irreconcilable Past: Photographic Memory as Historical Tragedy
We assume the indexical power of photography to capture a passing/past moment. Yet, both memory and the photographic image are fraught with contestation, especially when these reference violent historical events. We see this in repeated instances of distress and unrest in this community over images that evoke painful memory of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Examining a set of photographic images, I explore the two ways in which we usually view the photographic image evoking historical violence: (1) as an index of reality, and (2) as a statement meant to elicit a humanist response. I argue that both are inadequate, and that we should look at the image in the same way we view tragedy: as a refusal to reconcile the violence it purportedly records with some accepted 'reality', or its incorporation into some universalist humanist story that serve the interests of the state (of Vietnam) or the empire (of the US).
Nguyen-vo Thu-huong is the current Associate Director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and is Associate Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is currently working on a book project on necropolitical events and their mediation in Vietnamese postcolonial and diasporic contexts. Her most recent publication is "Iterant Remains: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Mediating the Necropolitical Event" Choregraphies Suspendues, Musee d'art contemporain Carre d'art (2014).
Cara Le
The Labor of Longing is a collection of stories and poems in spite of and in tribute to the silences that constituted the author's childhood, particularly around her mother's personal life.
Cara Le is an LA-based introvert, community organizer, teacher, and writer. She is working on her Master's thesis in Asian American Studies at UCLA on how Vietnamese American women remember war in ways that disrupt dominant narratives. For three years now, she's been working on the companion chapbook to A Roof & Some Refuge (stories and poems about her dad), called The Labor of Longing (stories and poems about her mom).
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