“30 Years Beyond the War: Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and Asian/American Studies”

April 19-20, 2005

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~fiona/conference.htm

Sponsored by Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual, Performance (SEATRiP-UCR), the Ethnic Studies Department - UCSD, the UCSD Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity (CSRE), UCSD California Cultures in Comparative Perspective, International Education Programs-UCR Extension, and the Vietnamese American Caucus of the Association for Asian American Studies.

Free and open to the public.

See the conference website (above) for the complete schedule and location.

This two-day conference takes the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon as a time to reflect on Vietnamese, Vietnamese/American, Southeast Asian, and Southeast Asian/American Studies – where these fields have been, where they are headed, and the place that the U.S. war in Southeast Asia has played in shaping both U.S. and Southeast Asian politics and culture. The history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia is an important contemporary topic as memories of war are written and re-written for multiple purposes in multiple places such as in the language used to discuss U.S. foreign policy, in the discourse of the current presidential campaign, in the structuring of trade and the place of Southeast Asian goods in the U.S. and global markets, and in discussions of the movement of Southeast Asian nationals in international venues. In the spirit of exploring the lasting connections between these two regions, this conference will feature papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, films, videos, readings, and performances dealing with a range of topics, including, but not limited to transnational and mixed-race identities, the politics of remembering the war, the intersections of Vietnamese and Vietnamese/American Studies, Southeast Asian immigration, community development, the Southeast Asian diaspora, Vietnamese/American culture, comparative ethnic projects, studies of the Hmong, Mien, etc., Southeast Asian Studies in a comparative context, cultural production, multiple histories of Southeast Asian, Vietnamese, Southeast Asian and Asian/American autobiography, community politics, and the meanings of cultural contact.

In order to investigate these rich fields, this conference is open to scholars, artists, and community members. The conference is an interdisciplinary event, and the conference committee welcomes individual paper and panel proposals from a wide variety of disciplines including, but not limited to literature, history, sociology, art history, visual cultures, political science, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, Asian studies and area studies, the performing arts, film or video making, writing, and community activism and leadership.