Thu-huong Nguyen-vo _"A Conversation on Transhistorical Decolonization: Vietnamese Liberation and Refugee Youth Political Engagement with Palestine"

In Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge (UC Press, 2024), I question practices of sovereignty at the heart of modern understandings of what it means to be human in a history imagined as moving ever closer to human mastery at its end. If colonialism and imperialism subjugate others by treating them as less than human in this progressive historiography, nationalist and liberation movements have sought to reverse such dialectics, yet stayed well within this understanding of the human defined by sovereignty. As both colonization and liberation entail mass violence that did not deliver human freedom for the many, global capital picks up the pieces and extracts profit from assigning varying worth to people inhabiting geographical zones based on distance to this promise.

In this moment, Israeli occupation of and genocide in Gaza has urgently renewed interest in a global and transhistorical decolonization framework for a new generation of youth activists. On college campuses, particularly those situated near large Vietnamese refugee communities, many students of Vietnamese heritage have been active in protest movements calling for divestment from Israeli war efforts, and support for Palestinian liberation. Within this necessary political engagement, many activists have equated Vietnamese wars of liberation with Palestinian liberation as the basis of decolonizing solidarity, although the former implies an endorsement of historical Vietnamese settler colonialism, which had continued under French colonialism and American imperialism. Given the book’s exploration of modern understandings of sovereignty and its costs as well as alternative ways of being in the world, how might we approach a transhistorical understanding of decolonization? Rather than a presentation of some finished thesis, I would like to engage in an exchange that asks what potentials decolonization holds, with perhaps new political and epistemological assemblages not exclusively understood in terms of sovereignty.

Bio:
Thu-huong Nguyen-vo teaches in Asian Languages and Cultures and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her most recent book, Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge (2024), looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist in the catastrophes resulting from modern practices of sovereignty. Her other publications explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the (inter)colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, and activists. She teaches graduate seminars in critical theory and undergraduate courses in Vietnamese and Vietnamese American politics and culture.