L98 AMCS 3360 - Topics in AMCS: The Remnants of War
This course focuses on U.S. military involvement in Asia-Pacific to explore the growth and trajectory of U.S. empire after World War II. Asia-Pacific is a contested site where U.S. imperialism is both hidden and exposed. The course will explore not just the history of U.S. engagement with Asia-Pacific and its impacts on the region and the people, but more importantly how the people in the region have been voicing their critiques of U.S. presence in their lands and of its violence on their people. The topics of focus will be U.S. militarism and war, the construction of U.S. "benevolent empire," the growth of racial/gendered capitalism, transnational migration/refugee passage, the afterlives of U.S. military intervention in the region.
What are some course topics that you would like to highlight?
In this class, we will engage with Asian American and transpacific critiques of US militarism. Centering Asia Pacific, we will examine how US imperialism is both hidden (under the rhetoric of benevolence) and exposed (through massive military aggression). We will study Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders' cultural productions to explore the making of Asia-Pacific America as local, regional, national, and global defiance against US imperialism. Several themes will emerge in the readings, including war and empire, memory and history, transnational migration/refugee passage, gendered violence and trauma.
Dr. Nguyen-Dien is a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas (KU) and was a Sias Graduate Fellow at KU’s Hall Center for Humanities. Her research interests include Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, memories and histories, affect and empire, transpacific critiques, and race relations. Her articles and essays have appeared in/ are forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, American Studies, Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies (edited by Professor Yen Le Espiritu). She has contributed to several collaborative projects, including a digital humanities initiative that explores Asian experience in the Midwest and a documentary about Asian Americans and racial trauma.
Dr. Nguyen-Dien is currently working on a book manuscript titled Feeling History: The Specter of War, Geography of Violence, and Vietnamese Refugee Affective Worlding. This book explores the afterlives of the Vietnam War through emotional textures of refugee experiences. Situated in a larger scholarship of the haunting of U.S. militarism in Asia-Pacific and the affective afterlives of the Cold War politics, this project emphasizes how the history of empire-building, nation-building, and war-making is also a history of affective cultivation. Through refugee feelings, this work seeks to imagine a new politics of affective decolonization that rests on shared compassions for the ghosts of those who died unjust deaths across multiple geographies of violence.
