ann ngoc tran
Research
Book Project
Nonarrival: Vietnam and the Vanishing Points of Diaspora
The Boat of No Smiles, 1977. AP Photo.
I am an interdisciplinary historian of ethnicity, race, empire, and migration. My research centers on global Southeast Asian diasporas with a focus on postwar Vietnam. I examine how Southeast Asian refugees and im/migrants navigate, contest, and reconfigure the violent edifices of global empire, nation-states, and borders.
My in-progress monograph, Nonarrival: Vietnam and the Vanishing Points of Diaspora, examines the postwar histories of Vietnam’s multiethnic diasporas through what I call vanishing points: positions in time and space where subjects disappear within dyadic formations of history, territory, and memory. Taking “Vietnamese America” as a rupture point for rethinking the U.S. nation-state as the organizing horizon of diasporic migration after April 1975, the project centers on internal displacements and inter-Asia movements that escape the ledger of cross-continental migration, along with minoritized ethnic and Indigenous pluralities unmapped by the Vietnamese (Kinh) American refugee subject.
Bridging cultural critique with multilingual archival research across the United States, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia, Nonarrival disaggregates the transnational into granular histories that map the texture of refugee movements across borderlands, zones of exception, islands, refugee camps, and maritime corridors while illuminating the macroscopic state mechanisms that preempt the viability of asylum. Across its chapters, the manuscript follows disjunctive histories of diaspora to their vanishing points, where refugee nonarrival interrupts the impulse for historical recovery by locating the limits of the nation-state as a threshold for renewed possibilities of freedom, redress, and more-than-human relations that exceed conditional forms of national belonging.
Nonarrival, as both an analytic and a method, is accountable to the irrecoverable, the uncounted, and the ungrievable who have fallen victim to ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, racist bordering regimes, economic deprivations, political repression, and extralegal violence. In registering these nonarrivals, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement, turning instead to the contingencies of migration as they are lived and shaped by those beyond borders and nation-states.
Works in progress
Book Chapter
"Vietnamese Refugee Fishing: Labor, Displacement, and Livelihood Strategies on the Gulf Coast" (Accepted)
In this chapter in an anthology on Stories of Refugeeness on the Gulf Coast, I historicize the life-making practices and survival strategies Vietnamese American fisherfolk used during and after displacement by war, political persecution, and economic devastation. Drawing on archival newspapers and oral histories recorded between 2009 and 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Heritage, I explore how fishing as a mode of labor and livelihood is transformed and/or reinvigorated as Vietnamese fishers transition their practice from Vietnam to the U.S. Gulf South. In particular, this chapter concentrates on the livelihood strategies that allowed refugee fisherfolk to circumvent the numerous cultural, economic, and racial barriers they encountered after resettlement, and how they navigated these challenges through a latticework of mutual aid and co-ethnic collaboration.
Article
The Political Economy of Refugee Burden: Pulau Bidong, Boat Refugees, and the Malaysian Dilemma
Drawing on recently declassified Malay-language state documents from archives in Terengganu and Kuala Lumpur and the Malaysian Red Crescent Society’s program reports, this article zooms into a relatively unknown part of Pulau Bidong’s rich history as a refugee camp site in the South China Sea: the fiscal costs, logistical labor, and contractual payments that sustained the island’s function beyond UNHCR donations, and the intimate encounters that shaped—and strained—Malay-Vietnamese relations. Through a close examination of the economic crises that beset the Terengganu state government in its maintenance of Bidong island, the paper articulates what I call the political economy of refugee burden: a distributed system of refugee governance that, through Western nation-states’ cost-shifting, selective processing, and racial indictment, ensconces a globally differentiated social order tied to the selectively realizable capacity for “human rights” across the Global North-South divide.