Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations

My dissertation, Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations, is a transnational study of how contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions mediate Cold War epistemologies through what I call an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment. Building on the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, my dissertation argues that nonalignment can be understood beyond its past origins as a nationalist venture characterized by internationalist state policies, alliances, and politics. Rather, my dissertation re-articulates nonalignment as an embodied diasporic method, reading practice, and epistemological critique of empire that can continue to respond to past, contemporary, and transnational dynamics of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. As such, it draws on critical race, ethnic, and feminist studies methodologies to offer an eclectic archive of fine art by current Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic artists that use their art practice to unsettle the political terms, cartographies, and historiographies of empire in and in relation to Việt Nam. Borrowing from and pushing against certain dimensions of diplomatic history and art criticism, each chapter illuminates central analytics related to an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment by using a multi-sensorial and embodied hermeneutic that invokes the haptic, poetic, and sonic. Chapter One analyzes how independent filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi cinematically uses the sense of touch to unsettle the history and ongoing project of Việt settler colonialism that continues to threaten Chăm lives. Chapter Two demonstrates how the poetic imaginaries created between the mixed-race descendants of Senegalese colonial soldiers and Vietnamese civilian women reveal the contours of French white supremacy and métissage noir in an art installation by multi-media artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn. Lastly, Chapter Three explores how installation artist Hương Ngô repurposes inter-generational stories of post-war Vietnamese migration from Việt Nam to the French suburbs though Vietnamese sound and performance to reject Cold War logics of space. Taken together, Embodied Nonalignment argues that these Vietnamese artists offer queer enactments of nonalignment that fundamentally triangulate—as a means of offering an alternative—to the impossible binaries of colonial, Cold War, postcolonial nationalist, and conflicting diasporic nationalist paradigms that still impact how Vietnamese histories and Vietnamese diasporas are understood today