Legacies of 1975 in Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas: Fifty Years Afterward
This is the webpage for the Modern Language Association 2025 special session #592 “Legacies of 1975 in Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas: Fifty Years Afterward.” The MLA 2025 conference takes place on January 9–12, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Our roundtable meets on Saturday, January 11, 2025, 1:45 PM-3:00 PM, in Bridge (Hilton New Orleans Riverside).
Contact: Howie Tam at hjtam@brandeis.edu.
Keep scrolling to learn more about this roundtable, see how you may participate, and get more updates ↓↓↓
Focused on francophone cultural production to illuminate the trajectories of imperialism and migration that link France, Southeast Asia, and the United States, we invite reflection and discussion on following questions:
- How have writers, filmmakers, artists, and activists grappled with the legacies of 1975, which often reach deeper into French colonial history in Southeast Asia?
- How do literary, visual, and aural texts work to unsettle the fixity of iconic historical signifiers such as “1975”?
- How does textual and/or visual representation allow us to think about a specific point in the past as refracted through other moments and geographic locations?
- How have various disciplines (such as critical refugee studies, Transpacific studies) arisen and evolved in response to 1975 and its aftermath?
- What can the legacies of 1975 and the Second Indochina War teach us in the contexts of other histories of war, decolonization, and displacement?
As part of this panel, we encourage interested colleagues in and beyond Francophone Studies to submit questions, quotes, images, etc. to be included in the conversation. We welcome your input based on the topics listed above. Please email hjtam@brandeis.edu by January 10, 2025 at 5pm (Central Time).
The participants of this roundtable are members of the Asie du Sud-Est Research Nework (ASERN). Click here to learn more about us.
Presiders:
– Leslie Barnes (Australian National University)
– Howie Tam (Brandeis University)
Speakers:
– Karl Britto (University of California, Berkeley)
– Elizabeth Collins (University of Pennsylvania)
– Caroline D. Laurent (American University of Paris)
– Catherine H. Nguyen (Emerson College)
– Giang Huong Nguyen (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
– Maika Nguyen (University College Dublin)
– Alan Yeh (University of California, Berkeley)
After the roundtable, we’ll meet at Dong Phuong Bakery. Join us!
