Toxic Memories: Ecologies, Bodies, and Dissent in the Aftermath of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

How we remember war, and how we forget war, has long been a topic of scholarly debate and public struggle. In these often-pitched battles—recall the fight over the Vietnam War memorial—we often assume that memories belong only to the humans—to the soldiers who served, the families who grieved, the conquering forces, the fallen heroes. But war is more than a struggle between humans, or even between the human and the inhuman in us. As many recent scholars have shown, it exposes the ties between humans and the physical environment that they inhabit. War’s loss is sweeping. Plants, animals, soil, water, humans, the dead, the living: all have been vulnerable to war, and all have been bound by its effects.

What would we see if we looked for war’s traces not in national monuments, or even in roadside markers, but in records of mass contamination, or in the “slow violence” endured by “environmental migrants?” How can we read the cases of skin diseases—seen nowhere in the world except in deforested areas of Vietnam—as a memory of war? How can an account of cross-species violence offer us a way to re-envision the costs and long latency of war?

This panel seeks to direct our attention to those ephemeral traces of war—found in the air, water, land, and bodies that make up its afterlife. Thuy Linh Tu’s paper shows how toxic substances of war, in this case the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, have lived on in the “curative” substances sold by the beauty industry. Jefferey Santa Ana’s paper shows how GB Tran uses natural world imagery in his graphic memoir Vietnamerica to represent and resist the delayed and unseen effects of slow violence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War’s militarized physical environment. Focusing on the way that gender modulates how exposed embodiments are narrated, represented, and credited with political importance, Rachel Lee’s paper focuses on the cross-racial, veteran and non-veteran alliances across space and time built by those attempting to prove toxic injury from exposure to chemical warfare agents and pesticides.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Allan Isaac, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Individual Presentations

• The Beautiful Life of Agent Orange - Thuy L Tu, New York University

• Environmental Graphic Memory: Visualizing Slow Violence and the Militarized Environment in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica - Jeffrey J Santa Ana, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

• The Chemical Sublime: Chimeracological Capacities and Disability Epistemology - Rachel Lee, University of California, Los Angeles

Comment

• Allan Isaac, Rutgers University-New Brunswick