Lan Duong will be speaking about her book, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012), which examines the postwar films and literature of the Vietnamese and diasporic communities in the United States and France. The book pivots on collaboration’s dual meaning as a collective artistic endeavor or a political act of treason. Reading across three national contexts, the book situates the cultural productions of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora within a historical context of collaboration. Based on this vexed history, Treacherous Subjects delves into the cultural politics of collaboration to challenge the braided ideology of heterosexist patriarchy and nationalism that underlie denunciations or celebrations of collaborative acts. Decentering nationalist notions of loyalty and collaboration, Treacherous Subjects asserts that in collaboration lay the grounds for a feminist mode of analysis the book names “trans-Vietnamese feminism.”
About the speaker: Lan Duong is Associate Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present-day. She recently received a Fulbright Research Scholarship to work on her second book.
Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde will discuss her new book, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Temple University Press 2012). This is an in-depth look at the dynamic and long-standing connections between Viet Nam and its diaspora in the United States. These links are especially astounding considering the many decidedly antidiasporic elements in not only the home and host countries but also the ethnic community itself. This rich transnational history—which has gone largely undetected, or at least unrecognized—is revealed through nearly two decades of careful longitudinal, multisite research, punctuated by the voices of 250 interviewees.
About the speaker: Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde is Assistant Professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Davis. Professor Valverde was a Luce Southeast Asian Studies Fellow at the Australian National University (2004), a Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2001-02), and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam (1999).
Books by the speakers
Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora
by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde