diaCRITICS

On February 19, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of San Francisco State University's Third World Liberation Strike, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and photographer An-My Lê were in conversation about what Vietnamese American art means to their practice.

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. 

Rocky’s music is a journey into the spirit of resistance in the form of loud bass, energetic anthems, and subversive takedowns of the status quo.

An exploration of how a photo contest preserves proof of the Vietnamese communist government’s brutality and manipulation regarding “Land Use Rights” for citizens in Vietnam.

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.

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.

"I dive into history while recognizing that I am more than a war. / We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. / We have suffered and continue to, but that doesn’t define us. // What value do my communities have in society? // Who is considered worthy of praise? // What is considered natural or unnatural? // What does utopia look like? // I decide. / We decide."

"Accuracy, though, was never Nao’s goal. Instead, Sheep Machine is a meditation on the act of seeing. Nao asks: what do we see and how do we describe it? It is a question of truth: is what I see true and can I tell you what I see truthfully?"

"To have Vietnamese representation on stage is imperative, inspiring, moving, and bloody outstanding. I cackled like a maniac whilst keeping myself from a full on effin’ sob fest. In fact, I am still processing these waves of emotion."

The blind man draws circles and traces charms / Bloodline cursed over three generations: / A mother burns her baby with fire and water / To prove the newborn is not his father’s future assassin.

We are Vietnamese. I did not feel at home in my own skin, a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. That is, until I met other Vietnamese Australian artists like Chi Vu who had Vietnamese ancestry and artistic sensibilities.

Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is the co-founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. In this intimate interview, she talks to Vi Khi Nao about everything from poetry, to the long echoes of colonial dynamics in France, to her fight for the lowercase 'i' as a form of subversive rebellion, to dreams, to wonderment, to the beauty of anti-theoretical living as learned from her dog Coco.