Black-Adjacency and Biopower in the Vietnam Years

• In Event: The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Abstract

Asian Americans commonly encounter racial discourses and narratives that portray them as “honorary Whites,” White-adjacent, or next in line for racial privileges after Whites. Similarly, Asians get triangulated through discourses that seek to disrupt a Black-White binary, only to reproduce a comparative model that understands Asianness as a relation between Black and White. While these frameworks have been helpful and illuminating in their own right, they nevertheless take on a life of their own to suggest that Asian racial identity is more aligned with Whiteness through an assumed privilege relative to other people of color and relative access to socioeconomic mobility, generalized as the “model minority.” Arguing for an alternative model, I push for a racial framework that understands Asians as not only not White-adjacent, to counter these narratives, but actually Black-adjacent. This argument stems from historical precedent with the Vietnam War and Black-Asian solidarity, and that is the basis for what I envision this project to revolve around. With historical regards, often what comes to mind with the Vietnam War is White male veterans and the impacts of PTSD, or the loss of life for these veterans memorialized in national monuments that posthumously deem their lives deserving of grief and dignity. Much less is said about the lack of grievability of Black and Asian lives during this time, even as such lives were in fact disproportionately subjected to the violence of U.S. imperialist intervention. I take the precarity of Black and Asian life and death during the Vietnam years as a site of intervention to imagine what Asian American Black-adjacency might look like, whether in the form of anticolonial and antiwar solidarity or whether through claims to community and solidarity in a society that repeatedly centers Whiteness as upward mobility and claim to relevance.

Author

• Kit Lam, University at Buffalo