Faculty Fellow Lecture: Justin Quang Nguyen Phan

The Institute for the Humanities invites you to a Faculty Fellow Lecture Series with Justin Quang Nguyen Phan, assistant professor in Global Asian Studies, whose talk is entitled Non/Aligned: On Refugee Narrative and Graphic Memoir in the Wake of Vietnam’s Wars.

In 2017, Thi Bui released her widely acclaimed graphic novel, “The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir.” The novel followed her family as they became refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War. Noting how Bui’s memoir illustrates how her family witnessed the incursions of France, Japan and the U.S., this talk analyzes Bui’s novel as a form of refugee knowledge production that de-romanticizes sites of diasporic gathering, whether the home, the family, refuge or nation. Phan argues that Bui’s artistic decisions do more than unsettle these sites; they provide a generative way to craft Vietnamese refugee narratives anew by realigning themselves with a diasporic, anti-imperial vision for self-determination, liberation and freedom.

Justin Quang Nguyên Phan’s current book project demonstrates how​ Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic art unsettle dominant Cold War, colonial and postcolonial nationalist depictions of Vietnam to advance a diasporic genealogy of nonalignment. His published and forthcoming works can be found in the journals Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; and TransAsia Photography.

Contact huminst@uic.edu for accessibility requests.