Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple U Press, 2012). Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present day. Her research interests include feminist film theory, postcolonial literature, and Asian/American film and literature. Duong’s critical works can be found in Signs, MELUS, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Amerasia, and Asian Cinema, and the anthologies, Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, Southeast Asian Cinema, Recollecting Vietnam, and Gendering the Transpacific. She has coedited an award-winning anthology called Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). A founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, Duong currently serves as the website editor for the group (www.criticalrefugeestudies.com) and is co-editor for the series, Critical Refugee Studies, at the University of California Press.
Mobilizing the genres of the musical and the melodrama, Kiếp Hoa [Life of a Flower] (1953) and Song Lang (2018) bespeak a nostalgic love for song and performance that resonates in Viêt Nam and the diaspora today, celebrating as they do a notoriously hybrid and highly popular opera form called cải lương. These films, I argue, offer a baroque window onto which the landscape of migration was studded with deeply-felt sentiments of exile; in so doing, they reverberate with a kind of southern Vietnamese affect born of a historically-situated sense of displacement and persecution and thus build on a cinematic archive that interlinks the fleeing of with the feeling for a culturally vibrant southern Viêt Nam. In contrast to the documentary-style imagery that persistently captures and petrifies terrified Vietnamese refugees in flight, in their extravagence, these films evince a queer, feminist, and critical sensibility that coalesces around the highly gendered figure of the refugee. In tracing the production and the circulation of these films, of their makers and performers and their refugee lines of flight, I contend that a Critical Refugee Studies (CRS) method of analysis functions most insightfully to center refugees in popular culture and to ascertain the filaments of joy and loss, of refugee memories and critiques, that are threaded within them. This mode of looking, as my co-writers and I argue in Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, is an allowance for “the worlds of refugees to be evident, on their own terms.” The task of the CRS scholar, then, is to map out the circuits of creativity and criticality that come into view in refugee works and explore the epistemological and worldmaking practices that inhere in them. As such, the fascinating stories behind the refugee movements of the directors and actors of Life of a Flower and Song Lang informs the critical apparatus which I interrogate the circulation of refugee affects within both the texts and paratexts of Vietnamese films.