tuannyriver

I made the following compilation from the online program of the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies. This year commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. At least two panels include the half-century mark in their titles, and several others reference it in their abstract. The annual meeting of the Vietnam Studies Group is scheduled for March 14 (Friday) at 7:00 PM.

THURSDAY MARCH 13

EMPIRES AND ENVIRONMENT: TROPICAL LANDSCAPES, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN 20TH CENTURY SOUTHEAST ASIA
Thursday, March 13, 2025
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Room A112 (Level 1, Convention Center)

As the twentieth century dawned, colonial administrators in British Malaya and French Indochina sought to harness the hinterland. Tropical environments served as living laboratories, wherein colonial experts mixed science and landscape to precipitate new technologies of control. Knowing the land and people was, after all, essential to effective governance. Yet from the mountains of the Southeast Asian Massif to the floodplains of the Cambodian Mekong, the environments of Southeast Asia posed significant difficulties to the colonial administrators who struggled to control them. Imperial projects were premised on preliminary understandings of tropical environments, understandings which were continuously destabilized via subsequent encounter and exchange. Outsider “experts,” stymied by “friction of terrain,” were variously aided and opposed by local interlocutors. While individual projects failed, this variegated group of actors increasingly interpolated traditional ecological knowledge with Western scientific technologies of optimization. Ultimately, they co-produced new understandings of tropical natures. Though British and French experts claimed to be undertaking their research for the benefit of their colonial subjects, the stories told at this panel show that the stumbles and successes of these colonial scientific assemblages had ambivalent lasting consequences for Southeast Asian landscapes and communities. The talks in this panel are rooted in three distinct Southeast Asian environments: the padi field, the fluvial lake, and the mountain pass. Anderson, McCaskey, and Keenan employ historical political ecology to discern how local and colonial actors generated the knowledge that administrators required to make remote spaces and natural resources visible (and thus accessible) to the colonial state.

Presentations include
The Great Dispenser of Ichthyological Wealth in Indochina: Science, Regulation, and Fish in French Colonial Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap Lake
David J. McCaskey, University of California, Riverside

The Colonial Machine: Public Perception of the China-Vietnam Borderlands 1880-1941
Sean T. Keenan, University of California, Riverside

NEW HISTORIES OF CAPITALISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Thursday, March 13, 2025
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Room A113 (Level 1, Convention Center)

Global capitalism has been in crisis mode since 2007-8. In contrast to North America and Europe, and to some extent East and South Asia, relatively few historical works have emerged in recent years to trace, reflect on and chart the trajectory of capitalism in Southeast Asia. We note that existing scholarly approaches to global capitalism in our region remain relatively optimistic when compared with our peers in the Atlantic World. New “histories of capitalism” of the Atlantic World, most noticeably seen in the works of Thomas Piketty (2013) and Sven Beckert (2014, 2019), show that capitalism’s investment in free market logics has only reproduced and deepened structural inequality over time. Emerging scholars in the United States have sought to revive an old debate about slavery’s imbrication in the birth of global capitalism and American democracy by calling out capitalism’s inherently racist tendencies. (Jenkins & Leroy, 2021) In contrast, a consensus appears to be emerging among social historians and anthropologists of Southeast Asia, that dynamic smallholders in agriculture and cottage industries continued to, or could have thrived, if only big businesses and colonial/authoritarian government gave the market free reign. (Van Meerkerk 2019, Bosma 2019, Tania M. Li 2021). This roundtable is convened to continue an ongoing dialogue among historians on the historical trajectory of global capitalism from a regional standpoint, with the aim of bringing out a journal special issue on the subject in 2025/26. At this gathering, we come together to reflect on how our work responds and relates to Atlantic World-oriented debates on the history of capitalism in general, and of racial capitalism in particular. Panelists will be assigned and asked to relate their reading of the history of capitalism in Southeast Asia to Tania M. Li’s “Dynamic Farmers, Dead Plantations and the Myth of the Lazy Native” (2021) and Jenkins & Leroy’s Racial Capitalism (2021). How can a “racial capitalism” approach renew older debates about deconstructing colonial knowledge and racial formations? What can the region offer to global narratives about capitalism’s seemingly interminable decline? Does it make sense to speak of a Southeast Asian variety of capitalism?

Discussants include
Van Thuy Pham, Vietnam National University

FRIDAY MARCH 14

PATHWAYS TO PROGRESS: VIETNAMESE NATIONALS’ EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORIES IN JAPAN
Friday, March 14, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room B240/B241 (Convention Center)

This session explores the various experiences of Vietnamese nationals in Japan, examining their education, identity formation, and employment trajectories in the context of globalization and the evolving higher education landscapes in Asia. It aims to provide insight into the complex interplay between education, migration, and labor market integration. The scholars in the session employ various theoretical frameworks and research approaches, including traditional and digital ethnography, in-depth interviews, and policy analysis. This session begins by exploring how English language teaching programs (ETPs) in Japan create an educational “niche” for Vietnamese graduates, build resources and inform their mobility pathways. It then delves into the development of the post-national identity of students in Japan, showing the interplay between national and global self-concepts in an increasingly interconnected world. Discussion expands to examine the often overlooked experiences of Vietnamese vocational training students in Japan, exploring how vocational schools can shape these student experiences into labor market segments specifically. This is complemented by an analysis of the shifting direction of the Vietnamese higher education market, especially IT training, and its role in facilitating skilled migration to Japan. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive look at the experiences of Vietnamese nationals in Japan, from identity formation to labor market integration. They highlight the tensions between global aspirations and national contexts, market demands and educational ideologies, and between individual agents and influential institutions. This session contributes to a broader discussion of international student mobility, transnational identities, and the evolving relationship between education and migration in East Asia.

Organizers
Hang T Nguyen, Vietnam Aviation Academy
Anh P Le, Waseda University

Chair
Hang T Nguyen, Vietnam Aviation Academy

Presentations
Vietnamese Graduates of English-Taught Programs in Japan: Navigating Work as Parts of the Educational “Niche”
Chi M Nguyen, Research Assistant, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD)

Postnational Identity Development and Negotiation among Vietnamese Students in Japan
Du V Nguyen, Waseda University

(Not) Getting Ready for the Workplace: Vietnamese Vocational Training Students in Japan
Anh P Le, Waseda University

Market-Driven Transformation: Vietnamese Higher Education, IT Training, and Skilled Migration to Japan
Hang T Nguyen, Vietnam Aviation Academy

ENCOUNTERS AND ECOLOGIES OF TRADE AND OCEANIC INDUSTRY
Friday, March 14, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room B244/B245 (Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
Extractive Regimes and the Making of the Gulf of Tonkin (1880-1940)
Anke Wang, Cornell University

PERFORMING PROTEST IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
Friday, March 14, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room A121 (Level 1, Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
From Nhà Sàn Studio to Nhà Sàn Collective: Performative Landscapes of Performance Arts from Hanoi
Chenghao Clone Wen, New York University

“TRANSLATION” AS PROCESS: IMAGE/TEXT/ASIAS
Friday, March 14, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room B230 (Convention Center)

Linguist Loredana Polezzi (2021) addresses the late twentieth-century shift away from “translation-as-copy,” arguing that the value of translation does not lie in achieving the untenable goal of accuracy or linguistic equivalence. Instead, translation, as “a continuum of local and embodied practices,” makes visible cultural connections and barriers built around language. More importantly, it reveals extra-linguistic factors operating at each juncture of cultural encounters—whereby “the meaning, information, and culture are manipulated, assimilated, appropriated, contested, shared, and renewed.” This panel explores the creative and political potency of translation in recalibrating discursive and material events of “Asia.” We are particularly interested in expanding “translation” as multimodal processes of representation beyond its narrow association with language and literary texts, paying attention to marginalized materials, subjectivities, and approaches in understanding Asia’s historical and contemporary participations in the multiple turns of world-making. Jeffrey Youn examines Joseon Dynasty’s travelogue-writing and map-making as practices of “translation,” which draw on lived experiences of the intensified global interconnectivity at the turn of the twentieth century; Eunice Lee discusses the “untranslatability” of inherited postwar trauma in two Asian American poets’ works, focusing on their use of translation alongside ekphrasis, the literary practice of describing visual art; and Ihnmi Jon questions the “transparency” of art-historical translation, tracing how the series of Sino-French cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era mediated the Euro-American reception of “new Chinese art.” Through our interdisciplinary inquiries into various locations and sites where “translation” takes place, we seek together much more dynamic processes of representing plural Asias.

Presentations include
(Anti-)Translation, (Anti-)Ekphrasis: Untranslatability in the Hybrid Poetry of Don Mee Choi and Diana Khoi Nguyen
Eunice Lee, Harvard University

TEACHING THE SECOND INDOCHINA WAR & ITS LEGACIES AT 50 (1975-2025): APPROACHES IN VIETNAM AND THE UNITED STATES
Friday, March 14, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Room A121 (Level 1, Convention Center)

Fifty years ago this April marks the end of armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—a conflict conventionally referred to as the “Vietnam War” in the American classroom and the “War Against America to Save the Country” in official Vietnamese pedagogical materials. In both Vietnam and the United States, histories of the war largely reach undergraduates in the form of selective curricula, patriotic commemoration, remnants of pop culture, and large- and small-screen iconography (from high-budget war films and television documentaries to video games and satirical memes). Even as the living memory of the war fades, its legacy remains central to understanding contemporary politics and culture on both sides of the Pacific. In Vietnam, the undergraduate population has come of age in a country that has known relative peace and prosperity, but one that must confront the lingering consequences of wartime ecological destruction, postwar retribution, and an antagonistic diasporic community—all while online scholarly resources give students access to narratives that challenge official histories of the conflict. In the United States, the shadow of the Vietnam War continues to inform reckonings about foreign military intervention and the violent excesses of counterinsurgency, anxieties over refugees and immigration, and debates regarding on-campus protest and free speech. The fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end provides an opportunity to reflect on how the conflict has been taught, take stock of emerging trends, and discuss new approaches. What entrenched narratives require re-evaluation? How should we rethink the conflict’s chronologies and expand its geographies? Which marginalized historical actors can be recentered and what resources exist to do so? How can courses/modules on the war complement and enhance broader curricular and institutional initiatives? This roundtable convenes graduate students, junior scholars, and tenured faculty who have recently taught or are preparing to teach courses/modules on the Second Indochina War for undergraduates in Vietnam and the United States. Our aim is to share experiences and foster open conversations with audience members across disciplines, generations, and borders to develop new pedagogical strategies and resources that support critical and contextual teaching on the Second Indochina War in a global perspective.

Organizer & chair
Andrew Bellisari, Purdue University

Discussants
Khánh Minh Bùi, University of California, Berkeley
Alvin K Bui, University of Oregon
Charles Keith, Michigan State University
Sean Fear, University of Leeds

PERSPECTIVES ON POWs IN ASIA: TREATMENT, REEDUCATION, AND WARTIME MEMORY
Friday, March 14, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Clark (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)

This panel investigates the experiences and treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) in Asia during 20th-century conflicts, examining the legal, psychological, and moral dimensions from a comparative historical perspective. Christian McCall’s paper focuses on Japan during the final year of the Pacific War, analyzing the treatment of captured American B29 bomber crews. It assesses the rationale behind the Japanese military’s severe treatment and executions of these POWs, contextualizing these actions within broader wartime legal and ethical frameworks. The paper also highlights the impact of these events on postwar trials and wartime memory. Lei Duan’s paper examines the reeducation of Japanese POWs by the Chinese Communist Party at the Yan’an Japanese Workers and Peasants School. Drawing on archival resources, memoirs, and propaganda pamphlets, the paper analyzes the CCP’s psychological warfare strategies and their implications for international military practices. William Vause’s paper explores the conditions and treatment of prisoners under the South Vietnamese and American forces during the Vietnam War, focusing on the notorious Con Dao and Phu Quoc prisons. By analyzing Provost Marshal records, the paper investigates adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the role of POW treatment in winning hearts and minds. Together, these papers provide a comprehensive understanding of POW treatment across different Asian conflicts, highlighting the complexities of legal adherence, ideological reeducation, and the lasting impact on collective memory. This panel fosters a deeper understanding of the varied experiences of POWs and the interplay between wartime actions and postwar legacies.

Presentations include
Communist Rebels, Returnees, and Prisoners of War: Navigating the Geneva Conventions during America’s war in Vietnam
William Vause, Texas A & M University

TRANSLATION AND TRANSFER OF KNOWLEDGE
Friday, March 14, 2025
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Room A222 (Level 2, Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
South of the Passes: The Nanyue/ Nam Việt in the Shiji and Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư
Jacqueline Jingyi Yu, Harvard University

STATE OF THE STATE: SECURITIZATION AND AUTHORITARIAN LEGACY UNDER VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST RULE
Friday, March 14, 2025
1:30 PM- 3:00 PM
Room B232 (Convention Center)

The Vietnamese Communist Party celebrates its 50th year of single-party rule in 2025. This milestone has been punctured by general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s death in office, unprecedented presidential turnovers, relentless purges of countless high-ranking cadres, massive corruption scandals, and heightened civil society crackdowns. The impact of these events has been propelled by the increased institutionalization of police and armed forces since 2011, capped by the crowning of former security general To Lam as state president and interim-party-chief, to solidify, stabilize, and securitize the party’s existential grip on power. Now is an acute time to systematically assess the authoritarian legacy of the Vietnamese Communist Party, and to re-interrogate what we assume to know about the party and its relationship to the state and society. This roundtable provides a timely state of the Vietnamese communist state over its 50 years. Which aspects of party, state, and society have stayed persistent, whereas others have not? Why? How strongly securitized is the Vietnamese communist party-state? How has civil society confronted and adapted to communist backlash at pivotal times? What implications does this state of the state have for research, scholarship, and activism beyond the academy? The roundtable discussants dissect these questions through the different lenses of politics, history, and civil society, from both within and outside of Vietnam. First, Tuong Vu chronicles the wax and wane of the state of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Second, Paul Schuler considers the National Assembly’s relationship to the party and its institutionalization. Third, Ngo Thu Ha draws on her 20 years of civil society engagement to offer a grassroots account of social activism under duress inside the country. Fourth, Peter Zinoman raises vexing issues on censorship and self-censorship that pertain to academic freedom and freedom of expression at large. In conclusion, Nhu Truong situates Vietnam in comparative context with other communist and post-communist regimes, and regional currents of authoritarian entrenchment.

Organizer & chair
Nhu Truong, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussants
Tuong Vu, University of Oregon
Paul J Schuler, University of Arizona
Ha Thu Ngo, Center for Education Promotion and Empowerment of Women
Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

WAR UNENDING: THE LONGUE DUREE OF VIETNAMESE POLITICAL, CULTURAL, AND LITERARY CONFLICTS
Friday, March 14, 2025
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Room B246 (Convention Center)

The Vietnam War ended fifty years ago with the communist defeat of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or “South Vietnam”). Yet the cessation of hostilities did not bring peace for many Vietnamese. Nor did national unification dissolve all longstanding animosities. Instead, as researchers have increasingly argued, wartime divisions persisted and even took new forms after 1975. Pitched battles gave way to the mass imprisonment of enemies, and political polarization deepened as dissenting Vietnamese fled overseas. While much of the historical scholarship has focused on diplomacy and military defeat, we contend that scholars cannot understand the persistence of the conflict without examining the social and cultural dimensions of the war and its aftermath. These aspects of the conflict, though already present in the 1960s and early 1970s, came into high relief afterwards, when the postwar government set out to “reeducate” former citizens of the RVN and eradicate all vestiges of republican artistic and intellectual life. Our interdisciplinary panel explores Vietnam’s social and cultural war through the analysis of literature, cultural discourse, and cultural policy.

Organizer & chair
Nu-Anh Tran, University of Connecticut

Discussant
Ivan V Small, Northern Illinois University

Presentations
Problems of Being in a Country at War: Three Short Stories from the Republic of Vietnam
Rebekah Linh Collins, University of California, Berkeley

Elusive Endeavor: A Multilayered Perspective on the Quest for Vietnamese Reconciliation and Concord
Quan Tran, Yale University

Socialist Economic Crime and the Postwar Critique of Republican Culture
Trinh M. Luu, Independent Scholar

ALTERNATIVE COSMOPOLITANISMS: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES FROM TRANSNATIONAL ASIA
Friday, March 14, 2025
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Room A223 (Level 2, Convention Center)

As the world becomes more multipolar in the twenty-first century, inter-Asian and South-South mobilities are resurging. In this context, historically marginalized transnational communities are developing alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that challenge and subvert hegemonic modes of belonging, identity, and citizenship. Moving beyond the colony-metropole dyad, this panel investigates how these alternative cosmopolitanisms emerge from and shape these resurgent flows of people, discourses, and media.
Drawing on fine-grained ethnographies, this panel explores diverse case studies across transnational and global Asian contexts from the perspectives of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and urban studies. Papers investigate performances of race, gender, and diaspora by low-wage labor migrants in Singapore, relationships among Chinese and Vietnamese women sex workers, musical mediations and imaginations of China in Kenya, and the emergence of Chinese bookstores outside China as civic spaces amidst political suppression in the homeland. Key questions include: How do non-dominant practices of identity, kinship, and community shape alternative forms of cosmopolitanism? How do these practices challenge normative narratives of globalization and national belonging? What roles do emergent mobilities play in shaping these new forms of cosmopolitan personhood and vice versa? How do race and gender drive and emerge from these processes? How can ethnographic methods capture the complex lived realities of transnational mobilities and communities? This panel attempts to move beyond Euro- and elite-centric perspectives on cosmopolitanism and mobility, highlighting alternative forms of inter-Asian and South-South modern selfhood. Its ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach provides much-needed, in-depth contextual knowledge to contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and diaspora.

Presentations include
The Sisterhood GuanXi/Guan Hệ: Debt, Sentiment, Labor
Xinlei Sha, Cornell University

ASIANIST LIFE WRITING – PART I: RETHINKING ARCHIVES AND MODES OF SCHOLARLY EXPRESSION
Friday, March 14, 2025
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Room B142/B143 (Convention Center)

What happens when scholars of (global) Asia write in the first person? In this two-part roundtable, participants and audience members will reflect on the intertwined practices of knowledge production and life writing. All scholars write the self at some point in their academic careers. Many of us compose prefaces, acknowledgments, and academic bios. Some of us will publish memoir, autoethnography, or career retrospectives. We also encounter first person accounts in our research, and we teach them in our classrooms. So, what does “life writing” mean to us as scholars of Asia? Our roundtable invites inclusive, critical, and creative conversation around this question, drawing in insights from scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds, geographic specializations, institutional contexts, and career stages. We will touch on questions of positionality, methodology, expertise, and publication. This panel’s discussants are re-envisioning the normative research-to-publication pipeline by drawing on unconventional sources, including life experience, while publishing in genres and venues that defy the expectations of area studies within the Euro-American-centric research institution. Through research on her father’s personal and political history, Yen Vu explores confessional discourse, including reeducation camp self-criticism, and how it interacts with oral history in challenging and revising narratives of the self. Maya Cruz engages Asianist life writing as a method of transpacific and Asian American diasporic feminist knowledge production and political praxis in the study of contemporary US scientific images and computer vision of Mars. Karis Ryu, a scholar of transnational militarism and religion in diasporic Korean and Asian American life, will share thoughts, theory, and praxis on imagining different forms of knowledge as they emerge from her work as an interdisciplinary scholar who also writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Shana Ye will discuss speculative auto/ethnography as a performative method that expands conventional academic inquiries in Global Asias by engaging with questions of the commodification of marginalized identities, the unspeakability of queerness, and everyday future/world-making. The session is chaired by Elizabeth Lawrence, a historian of modern China, who recently authored a family history-inspired, student-facing book on transpacific militarism, Asian American Native Hawaiian histories, and transnational adoption.

Discussants include:
Yen Vu, Fulbright University Vietnam

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE INITIATIVES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: HOME GROWN OR FOREIGN IMPOSED?
Friday, March 14, 2025
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Room B231 (Convention Center)

Sustainability is a fraught concept in the context of Southeast and South Asian agricultural systems, defined by multiple, often competing players. Cash crops expansion, especially intense in the 2000s, has transformed rural landscapes and resulted in dramatic loss of Asia’s most biodiverse forests, land conflicts, food security struggles, and livelihood problems. Various approaches to ‘sustainable agriculture’ are promoted by states, civil society, and agribusinesses in response. But who defines sustainability, who stands to benefit from the emergence of these initiatives, and who is at risk of being marginalized by them? Focusing on emerging trends in sustainability governance of cash crops, this panel highlights the power interplay shaping the futures of agricultural production in these regions. We present a rich set of examples where producers are pulled in multiple directions by various definitions of and demands for sustainability. In the cases of the European Union Deforestation Regulation affecting rubber in Vietnam (Nguyen) and the Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil initiative in Indonesia (Septiani), producer country players have created domestic initiatives to parallel, and perhaps to divert the power of, international deforestation program. Meanwhile, organic agriculture in Thailand (Baird) and food sovereignty ideals in Nepal (Sharma) have been adopted and localized in practice if not in name, reflecting changes in domestic consumption and production ideals. Given the diversity of cultural norms, political regimes, and implementation arrangements, we consider the forces reshaping decision-making structures and processes in sustainability governance in South and Southeast Asia.

Presentations include:
Navigating ‘Sustainable Rubber’: How Emerging Sustainability Initiatives Are Transforming the Rubber Supply Chain in Vietnam
Thao Nguyen, University of British Columbia

PANEL 2: COLD WAR-ERA PROPAGANDA & MEDIA MANIPULATION IN ASIA
Friday, March 14, 2025
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Room A213 (Level 2, Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
Voice of Love in Vietnam during the Wartime, 1954-1975
Tung Hong Pham, Vietnam National University

VIETNAM STUDIES GROUP (VSG) ANNUAL MEETING
Friday, March 14, 2025
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Union D (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)

SATURDAY MARCH 15

ENTANGLED AND ESTRANGED: HISTORIES OF VIETNAM AND THE SINOSPHERE DURING THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY
Saturday, March 15, 2025
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Fairfield (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)
VSG-sponsored Panel

Our panel proposes a “multi-scopic global history” that repositions twentieth century Vietnam at the center of interactions, contestations, and collaborations in the Sinosphere. By highlighting critical moments of intertwined state-building, the rise of new political institutions, and the expansion of trans-regional economic trajectories, four papers demonstrate how Vietnamese historical experiences can help decenter the mainland China-centric approaches to Sinophone studies. Linh Vu explores the cultural and science diplomacy between the Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of China during the early Cold War era, emphasizing the shared desire to create a modern Confucianism-based alliance. Anh Le’s paper reexamines the French colonial state’s tariff regulations targeting the rice trade in southern Vietnam and its ensuing conflicts with the Chinese community, highlighting the disruptions to inter-Asian rice commerce and the altering of Franco-diasporic Chinese relationships. Patrick Buck examines the Republic of China’s financial contributions and exchanges with the Republic of Vietnam over knowledge production relating to Sinology and Confucianism during the Cold War, showing how the Chinese Nationalist regime engaged with Vietnam’s ideological discourses. Luan Vu uses periodicals and travelogues to reveal the evolving perception of Vietnamese intellectuals toward China and the Sinosphere amidst the transition from the tributary system to modern nation-state governance. Responding to Rachel Leow’s call to “foreground historical processes of becoming, emergence, and ecologies of encounters,” we spotlight the overlooked entanglements and estrangements that have solidified Vietnam’s significance in global history and the Sinosphere of maritime Southeast Asia spanning British Malaya, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands.

Organizers
Linh D Vu, Arizona State University
Anh Sy Huy Le, Muhlenberg College

Chair & discussant
Claire Edington, University of California, San Diego

Presentations
Entangled State-Building and Its Ramifications: Colonial Rice Tariff and the Chinese Diaspora in Southern Vietnam, 1862-1925
Anh Sy Huy Le, Muhlenberg College

Vietnamese Intellectuals’ Perceptional Changes of China and a New Understanding of the Sinosphere in Early Twentieth Century Vietnam – A Study of Nam Phong Magazine
Luan Vu, Vietnam National University

Reaching into the Past: The Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of China in the early Cold War era
Linh D Vu, Arizona State University

Nationalist China’s Confucian Entanglements in South Vietnam during the Cold War
Patrick Buck, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy

FIFTY YEARS LATER: REEVALUATING POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM
Saturday, March 15, 2025
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Clark (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)

The extinct Republic of Vietnam (RVN) continues to attract scholarly interest and debates. This is the main reason for this roundtable, which seeks to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The first wave of scholarship began during the war and continued until the late 1990s; it viewed the RVN as wholly dependent on the US. Countering this interpretation, a second wave employed Vietnamese sources to present a more nuanced understanding of the First Republic and its president Ngo Dinh Diem (1955-1963), as well as the Second Republic (1967-1975). Building on this wave, a third one has emerged since the late 2010s to examine intra-Vietnamese relations, domestic politics, and the civil society of the RVN. The roundtable participants will discuss different aspects and perspectives on the politics and society in the RVN. An Thuy Nguyen addresses important differences between the First and Second Republics and argues that President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s action weakened South Vietnam’s democratic claims. In a similar fashion, Sean Fear seeks to demonstrate three core issues that plagued the Second Republic: the evolving extent to which the RVN exercised sovereignty vis-à-vis the communists over territorial control; the ebb and flow of the state’s legitimacy among anticommunist constituents; and the nature of political authority and discourse beyond Saigon and in the provinces. Taking a different tack, Van Nguyen-Marshall focuses on the civil society under the Second Republic and demonstrates that this civil society, including the press, exercised considerable latitude amid government restrictions and censorship. Lastly, Tuong Vu employs a comparative perspective analyzing political developments among the RVN, South Korea, and Indonesia. In so doing, he identifies important internal and external factors that affected the politics of the Second Republic. By offering a variety of analytical lenses alongside new evidence, the roundtable demonstrates that the third wave of historiography does not offer easy answers at all. Instead, it seizes upon the fiftieth anniversary as an opportunity to bring to the fore the complications and controversies about the RVN in the hope of gaining deeper insights about the brutal conflict.

Organizer & chair
Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University

Discussants
Sean Fear, University of Leeds
An Thuy Nguyen, University of Maine
Van Nguyen-Marshall, Trent University
Tuong Vu, University of Oregon

EXPANDING ECOHORROR: REDISCOVERING FEAR OF THE ANTHROPOCENE IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN CINEMA
Saturday, March 15, 2025
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Union D (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)

During the Anthropocene age and under the impact of capitalism, growing climate change researchers agree that we are experiencing significant and ongoing ecological alterations, both in terms of physical and cognitive aspects. Contemporary ecohorror narratives can be read as an attempt to carry environmental fear while also confronted with eco-ambiguity. The panel hopes to propel ecohorror cinema as a predictively visual medium for encouraging revolutionary dissent and proactive actions in Asia. In consonance, the panel brings four fresh insights into the interaction between ecohorror models in distinct geopolitical and cultural Asian contexts. The first paper re/discovers the ecophobia of deforestation and rising sea levels in Vietnam through the cases of Black Forest (2008) and 2030 (2014), which juxtapose contemporary environmental injustice and folk stories to articulate an apocalyptic cinematic discourse. The second piece extends ecohorror to the urban thrills of Hong Kong and Taiwan, exploring how garbage transfers both The Hole (2000) and Limbo (2021) into scaled-down disaster films and cautionary tales. The following paper examines the idea of ecopracticology in the Indian horror film Boomika (2021). It illustrates how the agency of girlhood offers the non-extractive knowledge of solidarity and care. In light of the smog crisis in post-socialist China, the final paper discusses eco-maternalized fear activism as a collaborative and life-oriented approach in ecodocumentaries Under the Dome (2015) and Smog Town (2019). Collectively, the panel seeks to paint a picture of contemporary Asian ecohorror across a broad spectrum of cross-genre representations and their potential for practicing sustainable ethics.

Presentations include
Under the Sea and above the Forest: From Ecophobia Sensation to Apocalyptic Discourse in Vietnamese Cinema
Giang Cam Hoang, Vietnam National University

POSTCOLONIAL MOBILITY AND ASIAN IDENTITIES ON SCREEN
Saturday, March 15, 2025
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Room A124 (Level 1, Convention Center)

Asia’s colonial history coincided with its exposure to modernity, resulting in the voluntary or forced movement of its populations within and beyond the region. This mobility compelled Asians to view themselves through an imperialist lens, shaping their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities within a colonial hierarchy. In postcolonial contexts, Asian nations became entangled in Cold War ideologies, influencing their recounting of colonial experiences through cultural expressions. Despite the collapse of the bipolar world order, Eurocentric democratic norms and global capitalism continue to affect the postcolonial experiences of Asians and their representations in popular culture. This panel explores the impact of (post)colonial mobility on Asian identities through films and TV shows by ethnic Korean directors and producers. Hyun Gyung Kim analyzes the TV show Eyes of Dawn (1991-1992), exploring how Korean media depicts ‘comfort women’ during and after Japanese colonial rule, serving as a symbol of national suffering in the postcolonial era. Juyeon Bae investigates the first K-Zombie movie, A Monstrous Corpse (1980), a pirated version of an Italian-Spanish Zombie movie, from the aspect of cultural translation under postcolonial conditions. Hee-seung Irene Lee analyzes The Sympathizer (2024), focusing on Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of the novel about Vietnamese subjects under French and American colonial influences. Lastly, Ji-yoon An discusses the challenges of diasporic cinema in postcolonial modernity by examining Past Lives (2023) and its reception. Together, these offer a comprehensive analysis of how postcolonial mobility has shaped evolving Asian identities on screen.

Presentations include
Postcolonial “Weakness for Sympathizing with Others”: Adapting The Sympathizer from Page to Screen
Hee-seung Irene Lee, University of Auckland

LOCI OF ADAPTATION: SITES, SCALES, AND ACTORS OF CLIMATE ADAPTATION IN VIETNAM’S MEKONG DELTA
Saturday, March 15, 2025
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Room B231 (Convention Center)

Where and how does climate change adaptation occur, and who is it for? On the one hand, adaptation projects can be seen as a form of “environmental rule” (McElwee, 2016) whereby state actors use narratives of adaptation to push forward political agendas. On the other, forms of “everyday adaptation” (Castro and Sen 2022; see also Chase, Crawford and Kaliski 2008) happen outside of or even in opposition to official projects. This roundtable includes four scholars who have done extended qualitative research on climate change adaptation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a site at the global forefront of climate risks and climate adaptation planning. Each scholar’s work focuses on various sites, scales, and actors of adaptation in the region: the official plans of state actors; the local adaptations of residents; the technical advising of international experts; the for-profit schemes of agro-tech corporations. The conversation will examine who enacts adaptation, to what, and for whose benefit. How do these different loci of adaptation interact with one another? And what does the changing makeup of actors focused on the Mekong Delta’s landscapes say about the shifting terrains of development in this region?

Organizer
Lizzie Yarina, Northeastern University

Chair
Erik Harms, Yale University

Discussants
Darius Sadighi, Princeton University
Tung Thanh Son, Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities
Jacob Weger, Seton Hall University

AUTHORITARIANISM AND STATE VIOLENCE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Saturday, March 15, 2025
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Room B232 (Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
Vietnam’s Responsive Authoritarianism in Education Reform
Thuong H Tran, Harvard University

ADVANCING SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES THROUGH INNOVATIVE APPROACHES IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS
Saturday, March 15, 2025
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Room B234 (Convention Center)

Amidst reports on the decline of enrollment in foreign language classes, the Modern Language Association highlights the need for innovative approaches to motivate students, including an emphasis on cultural components and application in real life contexts (Lusin, Peterson, Sulewski & Zafer, 2023). Thus, while inputs are foundational to language learning, access to additional resources leading to conversations are helpful in enhancing fluency. In the process, learners develop autonomy as they fulfill various communicative tasks involving dialogues, interviews, and presentations in front of an audience, among others. In addition, the use of technology and how it intersects with language learning needs to be constantly studied for teachers to adapt to the dynamic context where languages are being utilized (Warschauer, 2002). In this proposed panel, the members will advocate for critical and creative approaches in Southeast Asian language teaching that enhance both the learning outcomes and the intercultural competence of students through various innovative teaching methodologies. Panel members will present various strategies in addressing the diverse learning needs and interests in the classroom while also integrating technology in the process (e.g., archival exploration, museum visit, AI-based spoken dialogue system, poem illustrating workshop). We also present ways through which students’ collaborative engagement becomes an integral curricular component in extending learning beyond conventional ways while also exploring other pedagogical and curricular directions and language and culture learning opportunities. These teaching innovations provide doors of discovery which may lead to increased interest in learning both the language and the culture of Southeast Asian countries.

Presentations include
Poem Illustrating Workshop Series for Beginning Learners: A Collaborative Art Project between LCTL Programs
Hoa Le, Harvard University

REVISITING RULERSHIP AND IMPERIAL ORDER OF MING CHINA (1368-1644)
Saturday, March 15, 2025
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Madison (2nd Floor, Hyatt Regency)

Contrary to the cosmopolitan image of its Mongol Yuan predecessor and Manchu Qing successor, Ming China is conventionally presented as a self-contained Confucian regime defined by a singular Chinese imperial identity. This panel defies the stereotypical image of Ming China as monolithic and isolated by re-examining the practices of rulership in the early-mid Ming period. Convening students and junior scholars working on various frontiers and neighboring polities of Ming China, this panel proposes a connected view to center how engagements with powers across multiple regions, including the Mongol steppe, the mountainous southwest, the Japanese archipelago, and mainland Southeast Asia, constituted a key element of the early-mid Ming emperor’s style of rule. The four papers in this panel each address the role of various agents–envoys, monks, border officers, and lords–in co-constructing regional imperial order through diplomatic interactions, religious policies, and land demarcation. Collectively, the papers stress that contact with peoples, places, and beliefs kept the early-mid Ming rulers aware that their polity was not the sole power center in the world and that the reach of Confucian order was not without limits. Accordingly, the Ming ruling house strategically drew from a variety of people, rites, and institutions to advance itself at home and abroad. By revisiting the rulership and imperial order of Ming China, this panel has comparative insights for Manchu Qing studies and contributes to the integration of pre-modern China into global historical narratives.

Presentations including
The Scholar-Envoys: Early Ming Diplomacy with Đại Việt, 1368-1404
Sean Cronan, University of California, Berkeley

LIMINAL MOMENTS, LIMINAL FIGURES: STATES OF ANTICIPATION OR BECOMING IN VIETNAM STUDIES
Saturday, March 15, 2025
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Room B232 (Convention Center)

This panel proposes to examine certain liminal figures and moments in Vietnamese society and history as sites of ambiguity or becoming, whose very in-betweenness challenges us to come up with new ways of describing the diversity of lived experience and narrating historical change in Vietnam. Taking our cues from the anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, we seek to draw attention to those who live “betwixt and between” socially established categories; or those periods of transition which anticipate the arrival of a new social or political reality but have not yet foreclosed other possibilities. This interdisciplinary panel brings together scholars from history, anthropology, and rhetoric to examine this theme of liminality and becoming across modern Vietnam: through the idea of the ‘human’ in Vietnamese intellectual thought (Tran), the construction of patriarchy in the early 20th century (Nguyen), the embodied histories of drug addiction and recovery in Vietnam across the twentieth century (Edington), and social workers’ aspirations for postwar society in the Republic of Vietnam after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords (Leshkowich). In each of these explorations, the very notion of what it means to be human is at stake. By focusing on those bodies and discourses on the threshold of formation, we seek to move past dominant categories and narratives as the basis for our storytelling and instead consider the creative potential of the margins of social life for re-writing Vietnamese pasts and imagining new futures.

Organizer & chair
Martina Nguyen, City University of New York, Baruch College

Presentations
The Idea of the ‘Human’ Among the Vietnamese Scholar Gentry and French-educated Younger Generation, 1900-1945
Richard Quang-Anh Tran, University of California, Berkeley

Writing in Drag: Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, Gender, Patriarchy, and Speaking for Vietnamese Women, 1907-1917
Martina Nguyen, City University of New York, Baruch College

Recovering the Lived Experience of Drug Addiction and Its Treatment in 20th Century Vietnam
Claire Edington, University of California, San Diego

Thinking with Social Workers: Visions of “Postwar” Society in the Republic of Vietnam, 1973–1975
Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross

NAVIGATING BOUNDARIES: MOBILITY, CONTROL AND IDENTITY IN MIDDLE PERIOD EAST ASIA
Saturday, March 15, 2025
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Room A124 (Level 1, Convention Center)

This panel explores the multifaceted nature of borders and identities in Middle Period East Asia, focusing on how different groups navigated and negotiated their identities within changing political, social, economic, and cultural landscapes. Through four examples from different spaces and periods, we examine the dynamics of mobility, control, and self-identity from the 5th century to the 14th century. Di Wang’s study of Sogdian tombs from the Northern Dynasties (386-581) investigates how ethnicity, social status, and mobility are demonstrated in both visual and textual materials, exploring to what extent ethnicity mattered in the process of self-representation. Victor Fong challenges the perception of the Tang empire (618-907) as an open society by analyzing how the dynasty used its unique travel restrictions as a tool for imperial dominance. James A. Anderson focuses on the 12th-century Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, illustrating how interactions with indigenous Tai-speaking communities and neighboring upland kingdoms shaped the salt and horse trade, influencing regional dynamics and economic exchange. King Kwong Wong explores the dual identity of Koryŏ Koreans under Mongol-Yuan rule (1271-1368), analyzing how Koreans preserved their distinct self-identity while adapting to the Mongol administrative framework, emphasizing the fluidity of ethnic identities. Collectively, these papers provide insights into how different communities in Middle Period East Asia maintained and crossed boundaries while navigating complex identities and challenging conventional perceptions of openness, ethnicity, and the categorization of people in the eastern part of the Silk Road.

Presentations include
Horses for Salt: Life along the Ancient Road of the One Hundred Yue
James Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

SUNDAY MARCH 16

NEW FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Sunday, March 16, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room B231 (Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
“Cải hóa gái lỡ lầm” [“Converting mistaken girls”]: Prostitutes and Rehabilitation in Socialist Sài Gòn (Hồ Chí Minh City) (1975 – 1985)
Khánh-Minh Bùi, University of California, Berkeley

ALTERNATIVE DIPLOMACIES FROM 1938 TO THE PRESENT
Sunday, March 16, 2025
9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Room B233 (Convention Center)

No panel abstract

Presentations include
“Propaganda Diplomacy” and the Forging of a Sino-Vietnamese Alliance, 1964-1969
Johnny Zhen, University of British Columbia

WHOSE VERSE? WHICH VERSE? MULTIVERSE!: GLOBAL ASIAS IN/AS ALTERNATIVE SPACE-TIMES
Sunday, March 16, 2025
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Room A214 (Level 2, Convention Center)

Multiverse, parallel world, alternate universe…the imagination of other worlds and lives have many names. Remarkably, the recent decade witnessed flourishing works exploring the theme’s intersection with global Asias: with the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, the focus shifted from making Asian characters visible in popular representation of diversity, to foregrounding Asia(ness) in imagining multiplicity and plurality in our interconnected globalized present. Does “multiverse” generate other spatial-temporalities of global Asias? By imagining alternative worlds that simultaneously and independently exist, how can we rupture, repair, or reconstruct the world we inhabit? This panel discusses the trope of “multiverse” in creative cases spanning art, literature, film, and digital media. Tianyi Shou and Zhen Cheng compare mediations of East Asian diasporas’ multiversal experience in EEAAO and Past Lives, articulating plurality and flux as Asian/America’s transnational potentiality. Jianfeng He analyzes African American writer Nisi Shawl’s steampunk SF series Everfair, exploring Afrofuturism’s intersection with revolutionary heritage in early 20th-century Asia. Vinh Phu Pham examines the gallery work of Vietnamese artists Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Thu Van Tran, using plastic art to reflect on disjunctive diasporic time as a framing of the postcolonial multiverse. Maya Cruz studies postcolonial Filipinx speculative fictions concerning US scientific exploration of Mars, examining the relationship between the long histories of US transpacific imperialism and colonizing visions of Martian futurity. With these four papers, we open up the term “multiverse” from a sci-fi subgenre to a critical lens for conceptualizing Asia/Asianness as a nexus connecting migration, belonging, and community.

Presentations include
And all the Worlds in-Between: The Duplicity of Time of Contemporary Vietnamese Art in Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Thu Van Tran
Vinh P Pham, Bard Early College (BHSEC) Queens