Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Emma Shaw Crane, Columbia University

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Description:

Thuy Linh Tu’s Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press 2021) is the latest in a series of pathbreaking books – including Thy Phu’s Warring Visions, Long Bui’s Returns of War, and Simeon Man’s Soldiering Through Empire – that open up intellectual and political spaces for thinking the American War in Vietnam differently. Combining detailed ethnographic work with extensive archival research, Tu shows how skin became central to the concerns of U.S. war managers in Vietnam. While white skin became something that needed to be protected and made stronger through a judicious application of racist (pseudo) science, brown and black skin became the target of military and imperial violence. Tu highlights the complex and fraught ways in which US war-making in Vietnam continues to shape broader questions of race, geography, and beauty. Such entanglements, she also shows, are felt by Vietnamese women in the present as a toxic inheritance: one that has marked and transformed their bodies in ways both obvious and intangible. By carefully considering women’s practices of beauty and care, Tu shows how living on and making do in ruinous landscapes, post-conflict landscapes and cities might be productively understood as a quiet and ambivalent form of politics in its own right.

Working at the intersection of different disciplines, including geography, American Studies, critical ethnic studies, Asian Pacific American Studies, and anthropology, our panelists will reflect on the political stakes of Tu’s new book, as well as some of the new directions of research and politics it opens up.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda