Land and Water: Performing Ecologies of Statelessness in the Aftermath of the Vietnam/American War focuses on land and water as epistemological and ontological grammars to examine cultural productions of Vietnamese refugee narratives. Specifically, I analyze how Vietnamese/American oral history narrators, filmmakers, visual artists, and performance artists narrate refugee subjectivity in the aftermath of U.S. imperial war and Vietnamese communist revolution in Vietnam and its diaspora. I define ecologies of statelessness as the indeterminate zones of states of exception, which allow contesting sovereign powers to manage populations through the very materiality of the site of dispossession. I locate ecologies of statelessness in the body of the refugee and the material terrain of the sea, along with re-education camps and refugee camps to explore biopolitical conditions of refugee population management and corporeal manifestations of resilience. My work expands on critical refugee studies and transnational feminist studies by shifting inanimate land-based analysis of U.S. foreign and domestic policies on war and refugee resettlement to the very animate materiality of the ocean, islands of refuge, former U.S. military bases, and re-education campsambiguous juridical spaces of dispossession. I argue that land and water are critical performative spaces of transgression as geopolitical borders, aesthetic material, and ecological sites both in and around the body to remap histories of forced migration and Cold War history at the crux of Vietnamese communist revolution and U.S. imperial war. Ultimately, my dissertation theorizes ecologies of statelessness as transgressive sites for radical possibilities located in the body of the refugee, dispossessed peasant population, and the geopolitical spaces of forced migration.', 'This dissertation is organized into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter traces how ecologies of statelessness is performatively narrated through in oral histories of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans who have faced extreme dispossession from/on water and land during moments of regime transition as the Communist Party of Vietnam sought to solidify itself as a nation and its progress towards national development. In Chapter One, I focus on water through the work of Vietnamese/American performance artists to theorize the ocean as a contested geopolitical site for humanitarian aid rescue efforts and Vietnamese refugee subject formation. In Chapter Two, I center on land in re-education camps in the oral histories of formerly incarcerated Vietnamese refugees. I examine land as fundamental material for communist revolutionary discipline and justice, and land embedded with ecological remnants of U.S. militarization. Lastly, in Chapter Three, I focus on a mother-daughter protest to discuss the current neoliberal period in Vietnam and government land seizures (1986-present). Specifically, I focus on land and water as geopolitical and aesthetic material sites to theorize how ecologies of statelessness are constituted and subverted in the aftermath of war, subject formation, humanitarian aid, and nation building.

Last modified

• 11/20/2019

Creator

• Patricia T Nguyen

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-wvg3-na52

Subject

• Performance Studies

Keyword

• performance studies
• oral history
• political ecology
• performance art
• transnational feminist studies
• critical refugee studies

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright