Une série à lire sur le carnet d’Hypotheses “Rhizomes. Identités, Mémoires, Cultures”.
Cette série de recensions s’intéresse aux publications scientifiques concernant la diaspora vietnamienne qui retourne au Vietnam.
Pour retrouver l’ensemble des articles de cette série, cliquez ici.
Image “à la une” : Phan Dinh Phung street (Phu Nhuan district) in the evening #2 © Virtual Saigon / François Guillemot
[ndlr] Signalement d’un article paru dans Trans Asia Photography Review (Volume 5, Issue 1: Photography and Diaspora, Guest Edited by Anthony W. Lee, Fall 2014). Un numéro entièrement dédié à l’étude de la photographie asiatique de plusieurs diasporas. Il explore le travail et les réflexions d’artistes sur la mémoire. Nous remercions Caroline Grillot pour nous avoir signalé cette édition en ligne.
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen yearns for a box of photos her family shipped to their temporary home in Japan in 1975, a box that never arrived. The journalist Andrew Lam confesses to the “unforgivable act” of burning his family photos, which reduced three generations to ashes.[1] During her first journey back to Vietnam in thirty years, Kim’s hired car circles the roads of Bien Hoa, a town just south of Saigon, in search of the photo studio where dozens of her portraits were kept, only to learn that the owners have emigrated and no one knows what happened to these old photos. She returns to her home in Ontario, disappointed and bereft.[2]
Such stories of visual yearning are familiar to the Vietnamese diaspora. They are especially poignant for the first wave of refugees, those who fled in 1975, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, as well as for the second wave, the “boat people,” whose plight gave rise to the Indochinese humanitarian crisis of the late 1970s to the early 2000s.[3] For these two groups, photos are an often fraught, incomplete record of a painful past.
As they awaited their chance to flee, refugees hid, altered, abandoned, buried, or even burned photos that contained incriminating evidence of collaboration with Americans and loyalty to the defeated Republic of Vietnam. Many of those who fled abandoned compromising pictures in the name of survival. For others, photos that remained intact were left behind to make room for jewelry with which to barter and enough food to keep them going.
Photographs lie at the core of the Vietnamese diaspora, especially for those who struggle to piece together incomplete stories told by images, many of which were defaced, discarded, or destroyed. At the same time, such photos represent a tie to the families left behind, whether as memories of artifacts that no longer exist or as surviving images that evoke layers of memories.
Despite the prominence of these stories of visual longing among diasporic Vietnamese, however, few critics have paid careful attention to them. How has photography — especially family photography — affected this community? This paper explores the function of family images in recent projects by first- and second-wave refugees.
Lire la suite / Read more : Trans Asia Photography Review
Institute of Sociology (University of Warsaw)
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (Polish Academy of Science)
Call for papers – invitation for the conference:
The global Vietnamese diaspora:
transnational ties, cultural flows, political entanglements
Date: 28 March 2014, Warsaw
Language: English
Place: Polish Academy of Science, Pałac Staszica, Nowy Świat 92-94, Warsaw
We invite the scholars involved in the research of the Vietnamese diaspora to the participation in the conference organized by Institute of Sociology (University of Warsaw) and Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (Polish Academy of Science).
During the conference, we will discuss various dimensions of the presence of Vietnamese migrant communities dispersed around the world. The origins of Vietnamese migrant communities living in various countries are differentiated, including the colonial history (France), flow of refugees after the end of Vietnamese War (United States, countries of Western Europe) and cooperation between communist government of Vietnam and other countries of Soviet Bloc (Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, former East Germany). Vietnamese migration involves more recent phenomenon of economic migration. Vietnamese residing in particular countries are a part of global Vietnamese diaspora, maintaining various ties with country of origin as well as other Vietnamese communities dispersed around the world. The connections maintained between the Vietnamese around the world and flow of cultural phenomena include multiple areas, such as business strategies, political activism and religious engagement.
The conference is aimed to form a platform for the scholars investigating various aspect of presence of Vietnamese in Europe to share their research experience and enable the development of new concepts enabling to grasp the fluid nature of transnational flows.
Participants will be granted the opportunity to submit their papers for publication.
The applications, including the topic of the presentation and abstract (max. 300 words) should be sent to szymanskag@is.uw.edu.pl until 20 February 2014.
Source : VSG
