Endless Revolution: Aesthetics of Resistance and Relationality in the Neoliberal Peace

Date and Time: April 12, 2023 | 12:00pm Eastern Time

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What have art and literature to do with loss, vulnerability, and injustice? How is memory articulated and (re)shaped? Which stories are told and what has fallen into historical amnesia? In this talk, Dr. Quynh H. Vo performs a cultural and literary exegesis of predominant narratives of human experience as she juxtaposes Vietnamese national politics of representation with Vietnamese American art and literature to show how artists, writers, and scholars have navigated asymmetrical memory industries within the neoliberal market-oriented peace to create beauty or the aesthetic of resistance as a form of revolution. Musing on transnational nationalisms that culminate in disunity across Vietnamese communities and unsettle their kinship, the talk also sheds light on how Vietnamese national and Vietnamese American art and literature, whether departing from or conforming to neoliberal discourse, embrace an endless revolution through their aesthetic and political intervention into history, forging contested relationality, transforming political terrains, and reimagining alternative futures.