I am an interdisciplinary historian of ethnicity, race, empire, and migration. My research centers on global Southeast Asian diasporas with a focus on postwar Vietnam. I examine how Southeast Asian refugees and im/migrants navigate, contest, and reconfigure the violent edifices of global empire, nation-states, and borders.
My in-progress monograph, Nonarrival: Vietnam and the Vanishing Points of Diaspora, examines the postwar histories of Vietnam’s multiethnic diasporas through what I call vanishing points: positions in time and space where subjects disappear within dyadic formations of history, territory, and memory. Taking “Vietnamese America” as a rupture point for rethinking the U.S. nation-state as the organizing horizon of diasporic migration after April 1975, the project centers on internal displacements and inter-Asia movements that escape the ledger of cross-continental migration, along with minoritized ethnic and Indigenous pluralities unmapped by the Vietnamese (Kinh) American refugee subject.
Bridging cultural critique with multilingual archival research across the United States, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia, Nonarrival disaggregates the transnational into granular histories that map the texture of refugee movements across borderlands, zones of exception, islands, refugee camps, and maritime corridors while illuminating the macroscopic state mechanisms that preempt the viability of asylum. Across its chapters, the manuscript follows disjunctive histories of diaspora to their vanishing points, where refugee nonarrival interrupts the impulse for historical recovery by locating the limits of the nation-state as a threshold for renewed possibilities of freedom, redress, and more-than-human relations that exceed conditional forms of national belonging.