Book Launch: 'Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam'

In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, the book turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu’s concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of family life, weddings, and other quotidian scenes of life during the war. Phu thus expands our understanding of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam (Duke University Press) was published in January 2022. Learn more about the book at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/warring-visions

Speakers Bios:

Thy Phu is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She is coeditor of Feeling Photography, also published by Duke University Press, and Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. She is also author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture.

Rebecca A. Adelman is Professor and Chair of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror and Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War, and the co-editor of Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence.

Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. She is Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and an Associate Producer of Taste (Dir. Le Bao, Special Jury Award, Berlin Film Festival).

Sponsored by the Asian Institute, and Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies. Co-sponsored by the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and the Centre for the Study of the United States