At the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Annual Conference in Honolulu, I had the honor of chairing and presenting on a panel entitled “Diasporic Detours: Southeast Asian America and Europe.” Bringing together senior and junior scholars engaged in challenging US-centric research in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, this panel sought to consider both how US ethnic studies may contribute to rethinking Europe and its colonial legacies in Southeast Asia as well as how detours through Europe may shed light on US military imperialist history in the context of increasing historical revisionism and erasure.
My paper, “Transatlantic Testimonies: French-American Transits and Vietnamese Refugee Archives,” drew from one of my dissertation chapters and archival research on emigration applications from Vietnamese in France who sought to reunite with family in the United States in the late 1970s and early 80s. Examining the rhetorical and practical strategies that Vietnamese refugees employ to navigate the complex legal parameters of the global refugee regime, I propose reading these applicants as authors who must tactfully construct cohesive narratives at various stages of their refuge-seeking and refuge-making.
The panel also included Aline Lo (Colorado College) whose readings of the 2023 French graphic memoir Hmong by Vicky Lyfoung led into personal reflections about solidarities across the Hmong diaspora. This was followed by Michele Janette‘s (Kansas State University) case study of teaching the Vietnam War through a translation assignment of a short story about the My Lai massacre by Vietnamese-Danish writer Linh Ngo. Finally, Howie Tam (Brandeis University) spoke about postgeneration diasporic melancholia in French-Vietnamese journalist and writer Doan Bui’s 2022 novel La Tour.
I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to be in dialogue with such fascinating interdisciplinary scholarship. I am especially grateful to Aline Lo for inviting me to participate and try my hand at chairing at AAAS.
(Yet again I neglected to snap a group photo, so a cover photo of the serene lagoon by the hotel taken on the final morning of the conference will have to do…)
