Post-War Visuality: Afterimages and Images After the Corpse

• In Event: Imperial Surplus: Dissent in the Visual and Material Remainders of Power

Abstract

In contemporary social critique, genealogies of the human have offered rich sites to apprehend the biopolitical deployment of difference as a technique of global population management. This paper reads how two installations by contemporary Vietnamese diasporic artists, Hong-An Truong’s “To Speak a Language” (2012) and Dinh Q. Le’s “The Farmers and the Helicopters” (2006), engage with the discourse of the human and the management of difference through unexpected sources: war material left behind from French and US imperial excursions in Southeast Asia. Through an analysis of visual rhetoric, I suggest that the inextricable entanglement of obsolete war material and productive human activity that form these works’ central thematic discloses the oscillation between the afterimage, or the lingering of realities which have passed, and the image after, or the fantasies of capitalist futurity which demands the political and social foreclosure of the potential lessons of history. I argue that this temporal and spatial collision of images and objects – of past/present/future and here/there – present in these works generate a hermeneutics of dissent by questioning how fictional distances shoring up post-Cold War discourses and practices of American exceptionality and Asian ascendency – war from peace, productive from surplus, enemy combatant from human collaborator – are sustained in the contemporary moment.

Author

• Trung PQ Nguyen, University of California, Santa Cruz