The Purpose of Parahistory in Postsocialist Vietnam
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- RG01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
While it has become increasingly common for contemporary artists to emphasize polyvocality in historical representation and to test the possibilities of giving form to memory, this essay examines specific approaches to historical narration in the context of postsocialist Vietnam.
I use parahistory to describe artistic strategies that emphasize movement and affect, and operate crossings of one time and place with another to unsettle the teleological closures of the national narrative. Such crossings include historical episodes of famine and food rationing in Bengal, Japan, and Vietnam, as captured in films and performance works by Thảo Nguyên Phan (b. 1987) and Tiffany Chung (b. 1969). What is striking in this comparison of artworks is the way they parallel and intersect with the state’s own memory projects, particularly in their creative and curatorial staging of popular history. At the same time, they illuminate how difficult histories are rendered both present and indeterminate, placed yet displaced through their periodization as bridges within a developmental timeline. As such, these artworks reflect but also mediate the politicized logic of history, and its deliberate rehabilitations, as it has informed public understandings of the past in postsocialist Vietnam.
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Organisers
This event is jointly organised by the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and the School of Arts South and Southeast Asia Research Seminar.
Contact
Header image: Florian Wehde via Unsplash
About the speaker
Pamela N. Corey
Pamela N. Corey is an associate professor of art history in the Art and Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021) and co-editor of Signs and Signals from Vietnam: Essays on Contemporary Art (National University of Singapore Press, 2026). She also guest co-edited “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020) and “On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics,” a special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies (2014).
