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Panel

8. Negotiating Margins: Power, Agencies, Representations, Resistances

Global Southeast Asias as Method

1 - Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese-Senegalese Aesthetics and Cold War Intimacies

Thursday, June 12, 2025
11:15 - 13:00 GMT
Location: LBD-Conseil

    Presenter(s)

  • JP

    Justin Phan

    University of Illinois - Chicago, United States

Presentation Abstract
Drawing from critical race and gender studies, my paper analyzes a 2019 art installation by Saigon-based artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (The Specter of Ancestors Becoming) that critiques French studies of civil society and citizenship through métissage noir. In particular, it examines a less-known history of French, Vietnamese, and Senegalese intimacies as facilitated through the First Indochina War. During this eight-year war, over 60,000 West African soldiers were brought to Viet Nam as part of French forces. Many of them took Vietnamese wives who gave birth to mixed-race children. Now, over 60 years after the war, the descendants of these Afro-Asian unions are remembering their histories anew. As my broader work examines how diasporic Vietnamese art deals with questions of embodiment and nonalignment, I argue that Specter serves as a queer enactment of nonalignment that mobilizes speculation to articulate the diasporic as part and parcel to transnational feminist and queer studies of Afro-Asian politics that cross colonial and postcolonial nationalist borders.