Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Humanities, NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis) Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2021) examines the afterlife of the Vietnam War, and its continued impact on our understanding of race and beauty. By framing skin as a material and metaphorical site on which these ideas have been formed, Tu advances a theory of aesthetics and politics for understanding colonial modernity and the lives lived in its shadows. In particular, Tu foregrounds the histories of US militarism, biomedical investigations, chemical warfare, and the bodies of African American soldiers and prisoners, as well as Vietnamese civilians who were the subjects of research and remediation. Matthew Frye Jacobson (Yale University) writes, “Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.”

After a presentation from Tu, Anne Cheng (Princeton University), Avery Gordon (Emerita, University of California Santa Barbara), lê thi diem thúy (Hampshire College), and Chandan Reddy (University of Washington) participate in a roundtable.

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