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SWHNM 2022 Mentorship Program – Announcements

We are excited to announce the mentees for our 2022 inaugural SWHNM Mentorship Program. Congratulations to our 2022 cohort: Erin O’Brien, Lauren Bullock, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, and Rachel TonThat! Genevieve Erin O’Brien (they/them) is a Los Angeles based Queer Vietnamese/Irish/German artist, storyteller and chef. O’Brien holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art […]

Color Swatch 0945: Treasure Seeker

What does it mean, to survive? To be “too” aestheticized? To be considered exempt from injury (harmless, invisible, dispensable), yet at the same time to invite injury, due to the object one’s body supposedly represents?

Editor’s Closing Notes: Currents

Over the past two years of editing diaCRITICS (and over the last decade of contributing to both DVAN and diaCRITICS), I’ve given much thought to the tensions between the individual and the collective, in particular to how this is weighted for a Vietnamese person in the diaspora, who must navigate multiple points of pressures, both internal and external, familial and societal.

Matt Huynh: Cabramatta

I was conscious that the readership would be much broader and unfamiliar with the historical and political context against which much of Cabramatta’s gangs emerged, became Australia’s heroin capital and infamously led to Australia’s first political assassination.

Editor’s Note: Looking Toward 2020

Two years ago this time I was preparing to assume the editorship of this blog, diaCRITICS, from Viet Thanh Nguyen, and having many thoughts about diaspora and the vantage points—both fluid and fixed—it can afford us, which I wrote about in this editorial essay that marked the beginning of my editorship with diaCRITICS. Now, as […]

Making A Case for the Interior Life of the Diaspora

It is only the failure of the American imagination and perception—a failure and inability to recognize and make space for the full imaginative agency of Vietnamese visions—that has perpetuated the notion of a dearth or naivety of art of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Appeasing the Spirits Along the ‘Highway of Horror’

On 1 July 1972 during the Easter Offensive two Vietnamese journalists, Ngy Thanh and Đoàn Kế Tường, used a heavily damaged railway bridge to cross the Bến Đá River, which bisects Highway One between the cities of Quảng Trị and Huế. What met them on the other side was a scene of carnage: many hundreds of civilian and military personnel corpses littered the highway, the result of an attack two months earlier.

[Prelude to] Appeasing the Spirits

Her research focuses not just on the events of the massacre, but on the civilian efforts—spearheaded by the independent newspaper Sóng Thần (which my mother and father were publishers and editors of)—to identify and bury the bodies of the dead in the aftermath of the event.

SPEED 2: Sheep Machine @ Malmö Konsthall, Sweden

Vi Khi Nao’s ekphrastic poetry, Sheep Machine, on exhibit at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, in conjunction with the video art by visual artist Leslie Thornton that Nao’s textual experiment “narrates”.

Memory Work: The Missing Piece Project

The Missing Piece Project calls for a collective intervention at the Wall by Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and other refugee community members still affected today by the legacy of American militarism and imperialism in Southeast Asia. This project envisions a nationwide, coordinated, mass dedication of items at the Wall by refugee community members on the upcoming April 30 anniversary in 2020.

30 April 2014, Revisited

And yet: I encounter discomfiting truths here, within and outside of myself. How I have for years longed to come back, felt some piece of me missing for not reckoning with the Vietnam that was left behind, and then to come back and have to admit the ways I still feel I do not belong.

A Safe Space in Nature: Andrew Nguyen, Environmental Scientist

It’s the difference between a legacy of interacting with the natural world through a series of violent acts with the purpose of domination over a space, versus interacting with the natural world as a means of avoiding acts of violence, and trying to reach a safer place. 

Fantastical Dimensions: Antonius Bui & Their Papercut Art

I often times view paper as a metaphor for history. When I am working on these hand-cut paper sculptures, I actively carve out space for histories that are actively forgotten and erased in this white supremacist nation. The reductive process deconstructs the white canvas, revealing more and more truths with every slice.

“(Re-)membering” April 30th: a submissions call

A submission call for “texture poems” from the Vietnamese diaspora, in commemoration of the 44th anniversary of April 30, 1975. This year on diaCRITICS, we wish to reflect on this day in terms of both the past and the present. We would like to consider “textures” of diasporic experience that have since been gathered, created, collected and re-collected, imagined and re-imagined, since that historic day in 1975.