Endless Revolution: Aesthetics of Resistance and Relationality in the Neoliberal Peace

Dr. Quynh H. Vo, Professorial Lecturer of Asia, Pacific, and Diaspora Studies, Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies, American University in Washington D.C. 

What have art and literature to do with loss, vulnerability, and injustice? How is memory articulated and (re)shaped? Which stories are told and what has fallen into historical amnesia? In this talk, Dr. Quynh H. Vo performs a cultural and literary exegesis of predominant narratives of human experience as she juxtaposes Vietnamese national politics of representation with Vietnamese American art and literature to show how artists, writers, and scholars have navigated asymmetrical memory industries within the neoliberal market-oriented peace to create beauty or the aesthetic of resistance as a form of revolution. Musing on transnational nationalisms that culminate in disunity across Vietnamese communities and unsettle their kinship, the talk also sheds light on how Vietnamese national and Vietnamese American art and literature, whether departing from or conforming to neoliberal discourse, embrace an endless revolution through their aesthetic and political intervention into history, forging contested relationality, transforming political terrains, and reimagining alternative futures.

An interdisciplinary and bilingual scholar whose work hinges on the intersection of literature, history, critical refugee studies, diaspora and globalization studies, Dr. Quynh H. Vo is a professorial lecturer of Asia, Pacific, and Diaspora Studies in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies at American University in Washington D.C. Her research projects engage particularly transnational Asian American politics and aesthetics; power and revolution; race, gender, and sexuality; US empire, migration, and neoliberalism. Her recent publications include: “’We Were Born from Beauty’: Motherly Aesthetics and Poetics of Displacement in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong” in Reclaiming Migrant Motherhood : Identity, Belonging, and Displacement in a Global Context, Maria D. Lombard, ed. (Lexington Books, 2022) and “Vietnamese Literature and Ecofeminism”, in The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, Douglas A. Vakoch, ed. (Routledge, 2022).

Wednesday, April 12, 2023
12:00 Noon
Room 202, Luce Hall
34 Hillhouse Avenue

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