Search and Destroy: Southeast Asia/ns through the Lens of U.S. Visual Warfare
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Lui, Mary
Abstract
As the first televised conflict, the Vietnam War relied heavily on visuality, making it the most chronicled war in history. My dissertation, Search and Destroy: Southeast Asia/ns through the Lens of U.S. Visual Warfare, examines how this visuality facilitated the persistence of search and destroy—the imperative to look in order to gather information and thereby inflict violence—in the postwar construction and reception of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians in the U.S. The slippage signaled by the slash in “Southeast Asia/ns” is critical to this work as it encapsulates how the targeted landscapes, jungles, and refugee camps of Southeast Asia mapped onto and travelled with Southeast Asians upon their forced migrations abroad. I argue that technologies of visualization facilitated by U.S. military and news media—along with its resultant visual archive—have reverberated in state, media, and refugee memory to produce Southeast Asian racial subjects in the late 20th century. Through both the indices of archived spectacle and the very acts of envisioning, I demonstrate how militarized lenses of search and destroy enabled racial knowledge construction about Southeast Asia/ns through visuality. To this end, I utilize historical ethnographic methods alongside visual and discursive analyses to trace social formations and affective arrangements back to the envisioned ecologies established through imperial warfare.The dissertation proceeds chronologically, honing in on an historically-specific range of technologies central to the project of capturing Southeast Asia/ns. Each section stages interventions into different fields of knowledge that collectively comprise the broader apparatus of search and destroy. I begin with U.S. military intervention from 1965 to 1975, analyzing how military documentary, aerial reconnaissance, and visual strategy established aerial, chemical, and tactical warfare that collapsed Southeast Asian places and people into one detectable, and therefore destroyable, register. The second chapter examines two key photographic events of transnational adoption in 1975 and 1987 that leveraged visual cues of disability, infantilization, and kinship to convert Southeast Asia/ns into orphaned victims to be “saved” and “cared for” by the myth of U.S. exceptionalism and paternity. Chapter three assesses the friction between competing U.S. military and media discourses from the previous two chapters that emerged with the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the U.S. As the city with the largest concentration of Southeast Asian refugees resettled on the east coast, Philadelphia serves as a case study for investigating how local administration, police, residents, and media collectively envisioned the victimization and criminalization of Southeast Asian refugees to reconfigure narratives of “interracial” violence and multicultural belonging. I conclude the project with an analysis of Vietnamese cultural productions that grapple with the limitations of visual representation. I analyze works by diasporic woman artists that reappropriate documentary technologies to interrogate the relationship between affect, visuality, and landscape. This gendered media modality innovates new modes of looking (or not) that challenge the imperatives of search and destroy. By approaching the intersections of racial violence and visualization, this project spans transnational and trans-historical archives to connect urban, national, and imperial topographies of Southeast Asian racial formation. Tracking how historical and contemporary violence informs Southeast Asian racialization, my work attempts to theorize an episteme of seeing, imagining, and knowing racial subjects that has broader applications to how we understand race through visuality. The dissertation reorients discussions of the Vietnam War and U.S. militarization beyond modalities of documentation in order to resist the ease and violence of seeing-as-knowing. In doing so, my research historicizes the ongoing collusion between visuality and structural violence to better understand and combat racial violence, then and now.
Recommended Citation
Tran, Jacinda Spring, "Search and Destroy: Southeast Asia/ns through the Lens of U.S. Visual Warfare" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1193.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1193
