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A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group: Jacinda Tran

Venue: 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, Room 372
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20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor
New York, NY 10003 United States
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Add to Calendar 04/21/2023 01:00 PM 04/21/2023 03:30 PM America/New_York A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group: Jacinda Tran More detail: https://apa.nyu.edu/event/a-p-a-graduate-student-working-group-jacinda-tran/ 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, Room 372, New York, NY, 10003

 

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group reconvenes on Friday, April 21 at 1:00 p.m. Working group member Jacinda Tran (PhD candidate, Yale University) presents, “Visualizing Warfare through Disability, Race, and the Family in the Aftermath of Vietnam” (abstract below). Lunch will be served.

 

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary working group for graduate students interested in and/or working on Asian/Pacific/American Studies broadly defined.

 
Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please include them on the registration form or email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

“Visualizing Warfare through Disability, Race, and the Family in the Aftermath of Vietnam”

In 1985, Audrey Tiernan — a white photojournalist from Long Island, New York — went to Vietnam to document a story on Amerasian children fathered and abandoned by US militiamen as the “forgotten victims” of the so-called Vietnam War. In Hồ Chí Minh City, Tiernan photographed Lê Van Minh, a half-white Vietnamese child with polio, and the publication of his image in Newsday led to the legislation of the 1988 Amerasian homecoming Act. This paper examines Tiernan’s photographic encounters with Minh, and the process of his abstraction into a “symbol of cooperation” to “humanize” and re-masculinize the US state: not as a deadbeat father who abandoned his children abroad and lost the war, but as a benevolent benefactor over a decade after withdrawing from Vietnam. Tran argues that Lê Van Minh’s adoption necessitated his legibility as white — a condition made possible only through the visual authority of Americans. Through this lens, Minh’s staged “rescue” (i.e. kidnapping) upheld and redefined the mandates of liberal humanism and continued warfare.

Image: Lê Văn Minh in the arms of Rep. Robert Mrazek (D-NY). Photographed by Audrey Tiernan, Newsday (1987).