Revolutionary Others: Migratory Subjects and Vietnamese Radicalism in the U.S. During and After the Vietnam War

Bringing together Global Asian Studies, Southeast Asian American Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and queer studies, my dissertation Revolutionary Others: Migratory Subjects and Vietnamese Radicalism in the United States During and After the Vietnam War reconsiders Vietnam War historiography, which overgeneralizes anticommunist politics amongst Vietnamese refugees, to highlight the undercurrent history of Vietnamese diasporic radicalism enacted by refugees, activists, and artists, who organize for their futures against the increasing violence of the U.S. empire. This project argues that America’s contested relationships to the vast range of Vietnamese political actors throughout the Vietnam War era have shaped the long 1960s’ leftist social movements, undergirded America’s turn to neoliberal conservatism post-1980, and continued to inform the current political polarizations around Trump’s America. The Vietnamese diasporic radical left formation can be traced back to the late 1960s—including antiwar activism by South Vietnamese exchange students in the U.S., the leftist formation amongst second-generation refugee descendants, and the queer/feminist critique and refugee speculative imaginaries by Vietnamese American artists and writers. This history demonstrates an alternative genealogy of Vietnamese revolutionary politics outside the communist victory, rooted in past and ongoing engagements with cross-racial solidarities, queer people of color critique, and transnational feminist world-making. Based on three years of original multi-sited archival research and oral history interviews with Vietnamese/American activists in Vietnam and the United States, analyses of visual arts by Vietnamese American refugee and refugee descendant artists, and my auto/ethnography as a bilingual, transnational Vietnamese queer scholar, this interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research captures a multifaceted movement that exists on the streets, online, in art and intellectual spaces. While critical scholarship on U.S. militarism and refugeehood has focused on displacement, trauma, and the impacts of war in people’s public and intimate life, Revolutionary Others reminds scholars to take seriously the agency and world-building politics and radical politics based on community engagement, grassroots organizing, and political education that refugees and their descendants envision and enact