ann ngoc tran
Research
Book Project:
Non-Arrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance After the Vietnam War
The Boat of No Smiles, 1977. AP Photo.
Non-Arrival: Histories of Drift and Disappearance After the Vietnam War tells a vernacular history of the Vietnamese diaspora through the movement of people into, out of, and across the watery expanse of the South China Sea. Focusing on the two decades following the fall of the Central Highlands in 1975, the book explores the dangerous environments and social conditions that propelled people to vượt biên—to cross borders and seas—and the historical processes that shaped them into refugees, economic migrants, illegal immigrants, and boat people.
Turning to oral histories, Vietnamese-language texts and sources, and institutional and community archives both within and outside the United States, the project charts the localized consequences of war, empire, political oppression, and authoritarianism as a way to emphasize histories without arrival. Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position boat refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, which privilege survivorship and linear mobility, the book turns instead to ellipses in the historical record—the people abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, unfinished journeys at sea, and cases of boat pushback and forced repatriation in Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.
Through various case studies that follow refugees both through and beyond the fray of Vietnam-US migration patterns, the chapters attend to surplus and non-hagiographic histories that liquefy the borders of nation-states and diasporas, elevating a radical critique of systems that perpetuate global refugee conditions by preempting personhood and livability. "Non-arrival," as both theory and method, is accountable to the dead, the disappeared, and the uncounted who have fallen victim to ethnic cleansing, racist bordering regimes, economic deprivations, political suppression, and extralegal violence. In registering these non-arrivals, the book seeks to denaturalize the relationship between refugees and resettlement, turning instead to the contingencies of migration as they are shaped by people, borders, boats, and states.​
​
Works in-progress
Forget Her Not: Piracy, Activism, and the Search for Missing Women
​
Zooming in to the height of the Vietnamese refugee exodus in the late 1970s and 1980s, this project focuses on the incredibly fraught and violent histories of piracy, kidnapping, and assault in the South China Sea and the efforts of diasporic organizations to stop the horrors of sexual violence on the international stage. Drawing on the archives of Boat People S.O.S., the letters and messages transmitted to Voice of Vietnamese Radio, and digital and fundraising campaigns to locate kidnapped women and children in Thailand, I map a transnational history of community activism that sutures together loss across multiple scales—from juridical erasure and state suppression to archival decay. At the nexus of these various reproductions of violence, I argue, is the abstraction of refugee rape as an exceptional aberrance to liberalized state order, rather than a convergence of regional humanitarian neglect and extralegal economies of refugee women's commodification.
Falls Away from Saigon: Indigeneity, the Central Highlands, and the Ethnos of Vietnam
This article in-progress examines the Central Highlands as a settler-colonial frontier—a militarily occupied region during the Vietnam War where Indigenous soldiering and dispossession were not only consequences of wartime conflict but also the result of long-standing territorial encroachments by the ethnic Vietnamese states of South Vietnam and the postwar Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The paper argues that the erasure of the Indigenous Degar in narrative histories of the Fall of Saigon enables the figure of the Vietnam-era “refugee” and the postwar revolutionary successor to be consolidated around the Kinh subject. This ethnic identity, tethered to a homogenizing claim to a native homeland by both postcolonial North and South Vietnamese leaders, silences the violent dispossession of Central Highlanders by both sides and negates the existence of Indigenous homelands and peoples in diaspora. Ultimately, the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty in both postwar socialist Vietnam and its global diasporas compels us to assess the workings of settler colonialism as central to nationalist and diasporic Vietnamese imaginaries.​