Join us for the second part of our ASA winter colloquia series for Dr. Trung Nguyen's research talk this Thursday Feb. 29 at 12PM at Hart Hall Room 3114.
Talk Description:
Of what transformations in the racial capitalist mode of production is the Southeast Asian refugee conscripted to enfigure within U.S. empire? Throughout the 1980s, a series of sudden unexpected deaths amongst Southeast Asian refugees haunted U.S. national culture. Across medical knowledge production to news media to horror film, these deaths were cathected with the libidinal economies of the U.S. war-state and its aftermath. Unsettling the teleological fantasies of life after capitalist-inflected loss (what I theorize as necrovalue), the unexpected death of Southeast Asian refugee bodies became the projected surface upon which the larger conditions of neoliberal restructuring, racial capitalism, and the financial abstractions of the late Cold War period were made to unfold.
This talk examines how the horror film Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was one site that staged these questions. Ultimately, I situate this film and its historical moment within my larger book project, Loss in Perpetuity: Necrovalue, Iterative Vietnam, and the Racial Mediation of Permanent War, on the making of the Vietnamese subject within the racial capitalist mode of production, and how value is extracted out of their militarized war losses in and beyond the moment of ontological liquidation.