An interview with Hồng-Ân Trương

by: Trung P.Q. Nguyen, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Consciousness, UCSC

Recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Hồng-Ân Trương is an artist who explores immigrant, refugee, and decolonial narratives and subjectivities. She is also an Associate Professor of Art and Director of Graduate Studies in the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In February 2020, Hồng-Ân Trương joined the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, with support from Art+Design Placemaking, for Refugee Returns, a series of presentations and conversations about war, race, knowledge production, and political solidarity. After her visit, Trương (digitally) sat down with Trung P.Q. Nguyen, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Consciousness and Managing Editor of Critical Ethnic Studies journal, to discuss her work, temporal doubling, national belonging, the boiling point of the pandemic and racial solidarity in moments of historical crisis.

TN: You began your talk by mentioning that you wanted to critically examine the relationship between the camera and empire. What drew you to thinking about this?

HT: The origins of my work as an artist stem from my preoccupation with images of the American War in Việt Nam that I saw as a kid growing up in the U.S. I used to love going to thrift stores and flea markets with my dad as a kid, and I would regularly find old Time, Life, and Look magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, many of them with headlines, cover stories, and long photo essays about the war. I was compelled by these images and by the repetitive narratives that were told – they were stories that depicted the Vietnamese as enemy, the Vietnamese as cunning and duplicitous, never to be trusted no matter which side they were on. I internalized these representations of Vietnamese – people who were me but not me – and started to understand the paradox of the refugee. I am an enemy / I am not an enemy. I am to be killed / I am to be saved.

The recognition of this paradox is dependent on seeing oneself outside of yourself, the kind of double consciousness and cognitive dissonance that both Du Bois and Fanon talked about in their foundational works. There was a kind of existential experience of my own racialized subjectivity that I had to contend with as I confronted these photographs. I would be looking for my own families, literally speaking, in these photographs, because my parents and my two older siblings had fled Việt Nam in 1975 when my mom was pregnant with me. So it was not implausible to me that I would find my family amongst the crowds of nameless Vietnamese depicted in these photographs that I encountered. I didn’t recognize myself in these photographs, but I did recognize myself in these photographs; again, prompting this kind of existential crisis of seeing my racialized subject reflected back to me.

TN: Thank you for sharing that about your family history. I think a lot of us who have grown up in the shadow of U.S. imperialism have similar experiences with this double consciousness, how our bodies and histories are mediated on screen in jarring ways. What was the relationship between race and medium that you wanted to engage with?

HT: The camera was the medium through which I could see how others saw me. Not through what Fanon describes as an interpellation through language, but through the photographic image. The camera as an apparatus is an absolutely brutal tool of the colonial project, and of American empire. The logic of colonial rule, extended through the camera, is a total project that shapes all aspects of human reality and experience.

Since the invention of photography and the establishment of more accessible monochrome processes starting in the 1840s, the camera became a central part of European and American colonialism and empire. Taking photographs of colonial subjects and landscapes were vital to all aspects of the colonial enterprise, and were used in administrative, missionary, scientific, and commercial endeavors – endeavors that ultimately sought to study, control, and profit from them. The camera and its mechanical eye mediated the colonial encounter for its audiences, establishing practices of looking that are structured by this violent colonial gaze. This brutal gaze and that moment of colonial encounter materialized through the photographic image is what I have focused on in this relationship between the camera and empire. It’s a politics of visibility that, from the camera’s inception, demanded that all must be seen and identified by imperial authorities, which sedimented a positivist notion of the camera and the images it produced, and assumed a naturalized and unproblematic relationship between the camera and an observable, neutral reality.

In my work I have thought about what it means to have this camera, which from its inception has been an instrument of control, a kind of accoutrement of colonial power, as a tool that we use today. In using archival photographs – photographs which were originally intended for one purpose or instrumentalized for a certain kind of narrative – I am able to focus on that moment of the encounter – the encounter between the camera and the subject, and what materializes in that exchange and that encounter. I am often making still moving images, slowing them down, to make a quiet space of that encounter. I’m interested in crystalizing this moment to call attention to the inextricable ways that images are bound up with the political and social conditions of their making. In that crystallization, I focus on wresting subjectivity from that fraught relationship with the camera and its operations of power in an attempt to reimagine practices of looking that create a new ethical relationship between the spectator and the subject of the image.

I think part of what has driven me is thinking about the kind of ghosted afterlife of the subjects in the images – that despite the original dynamics of power or intentionality behind the making of the image, the relationship between the spectator and photographed subject always has this potentiality. Ariella Azoulay, in her book The Civil Contract of Photography, articulates this potentiality by arguing an ontological-political understanding of photography that allows for this open-ended space of relations between photographers, photographed people, and spectators, a space which denies meaning to be singular, closed or uni-directional. This is the space that I tend to dwell in, to figure out those different possibilities for those relations of looking and being seen to be radicalized.

TN: Your point about the “new ethical relationship between spectator and the subject of the image” reminds me of how you turn to historical pasts that are never “passed” as a way to examine gendered and racialized violence. Can you speak about the temporal politics, possibilities, and challenges of working with archives that are already marked by time? What happens when they are resuscitated, reanimated, reinhabited, and revitalized in the way that you do?

HT: A lot of the ways that I think about the temporal are bound up with the conditions I describe around the apparatus of the camera as a tool of empire and colonialism, and the completely thorough way in which it was used to sediment certain knowledges through its photographic representations. So in my work turning to historical pasts that have never passed and never will, I am constantly thinking of these conditions of their making, and how knowledge about past historical events have been constructed through photographs and cinema. There is a way that these material traces of the past through the image both link us to the past but also alienate us from the past because of the visual signifiers that we internalize as spectators.

While we live in a culture that incessantly suffers from historical amnesia, we are simultaneously obsessive about memory. What has resulted is the production of what anthropologist Andreas Huyssen has called memory cultures, which attach us to the past, but also suspend us because they function as literal suspensions of time. When I reanimate archival images in my projects I am often putting different visual elements in conversation with each other to try to point out a doubling in time – the archival image which points to a real moment in time, but also to the present time of recollecting that moment, and all of its attendant complexities of that recollection. So the difficulty is trying to gesture to being both inside and outside the historical event in time and to call attention to that act of looking, to make one accountable in that looking but to not forget that marking in time.

TN: This “doubling in time” (the double being the real past moment indexed in the archive image and the present moment of recollection with all of its accumulated historical conditions) reminds me of what you shared earlier about the double consciousness of the not/enemy.

HT: Another aspect of the temporal politics of the image that I think about a lot is how the image functions in memory and storytelling. The images and narratives I internalized of ViệtNam through reportage footage and the stories told to me by my parents transmit their experiences and trauma of the war. Marianne Hirsch calls this “post-memory,” the concept that stories and images that children of survivors of collective trauma grow up with often constitute and become constructed memories in their own right. Over time those images take on the structure of real memories, and the memories are experiences themselves. Post-memory is a kind of retrospective witnessing by adoption. Those who hear the stories take on the traumatic experiences, and the memories. It is the belated nature of traumatic memory that fuels its transmission. If the traumatic nature of the event defies its own witnessing, cognition, and remembrance, then, for Hirsch, it makes sense that the next generation is in a position to work through traumatic experience and its symptoms, narratives, and images bequeathed but not fully remembered or known by the previous one.

There’s a temporal aspect to this that is central to my work, which assumes that access to memory, particularly because of this belatedness, this lapse in time, is based on representation – so through oral histories or through images. It’s not just about the memory itself but how it becomes enunciated or expressed as memory is the key for me to think through this question of the archive. I often use the double, which I think works in conjunction with the narrative aspects of my work to frame the site and sight of trauma, and the ways in which time unfolds in memory. Through repetition, events become sutured together, form recollection, which is both imagined and real.

Detail of installation of The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold. (2016), Hương Ngô & Hồng-Ân Trương, Image courtesy of the artists. — Detail of installation of *The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold.* (2016), Hương Ngô & Hồng-Ân Trương, Image courtesy of the artists.

TN: One figure profoundly marked by temporal doubling is the refugee, a figure that is framed as stuck in time (too much of it), but out of time (not enough). Your work has long attended to those temporal contradictions but also other contradictions – enemy, but not enemy; saved, but to be killed; coercively displaced, but restricted in movement – that has shadowed over the refugee, especially in the United States. Can you discuss some of these contradictions of the refugee and how they inform your work? How are these exacerbated or transformed in a contemporary moment marked by heightened xenophobia, fascism, and right-wing authoritarianism?

HT: I was so grateful when Mimi Nguyen came out with her book, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages in 2012, because it so clearly theorized many of the entangled questions around temporal politics and the refugee in the context of colonialism and U.S. empire. Nguyen examines the refugee condition by critiquing the imperialist mechanisms of war through a kind of political-philosophical concept that she calls “the gift of freedom” – a ‘gift’ given through devastating violence and operating within imperialist narratives. This gift, she argues, has the awesome power to subject, “first through the want or absence of those things of which the gift consists and second through the debt that holds the giftee fast, as these powers produce his or her possible desires, movements, and futures. (These powers also engage multiple temporalities, both as an event perpetuated on an other and as the debt that commits an other to continuous subjection.)” Nguyen critiques the pathologizing diagnoses of refugee trauma as a disorder of temporality, what’s considered being “stuck in time”, metaphors that mirror the political discourses defending U.S. military intervention in Indochina—a “chronopolitics of development”, and anthropological discourse that defines entire nations or peoples as existing outside historical time and so then, outside the domain of freedom.

This aspect of “being stuck in time” is also perfectly articulated through the archive, because the archive literally freezes subjects in time; the two concepts are bound up with each other, because of the ways in which archival structures produce knowledge and are part of the larger project of empire and anthropological discourse. Temporal tropes take on a particular resonance for the refugee. For example, the history of the American War in Việt Nam, as understood in liberal empire narratives, denies coevalness – existing in the same duration or time – in order to contain the racial, colonial other to a time other than the present of the modern subject. By working materials already marked by time – images, sounds, texts from archives – materials whose existence revolves around contested sites of memory –distinctions between the authentic and the modern, who belongs, who doesn’t belong are challenged.

The project I did with my collaborator Hương Ngô, The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold. takes up vernacular images from our family archives to highlight that even these everyday images that seem neutral take on a visual language that Western audiences would read in a particular way. These cultural signifiers create a kind of cognitive dissonance which forces the viewer to reassess their understanding or knowledge of what they think they know about the image and the subjects in the photograph. These images, in conjunction with their pairings with transcripts from U.S. congressional hearings about what to do about Vietnamese refugees, point out the very violent contradictions on which this nation has built its identity and how it has defined its citizenry. The forms of cultural representations that narrate who we are as a nation reify the concept of citizenship and who belongs and who doesn’t belong – it’s a space of contestation that gets played out in these cultural arenas.

But the material realities of our daily lives, including the impact of how we experience race and gender and class, are in direct contradiction to the narratives that try to cohere a national identity. Woven into the narratives of the American immigrant or refugee dream are those contradictions – meaning that white supremacy and anti-black racism are at the core of that fantasy turned horror.

In our current political nightmare in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic we see this battle taking place – the fight for who can or cannot belong, who can claim being an American and who cannot. What these battles show is that these myths of the nation are entrenched and deeply rooted, it shows the logic of empire and colonialism. This logic has produced who we are. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their brilliant book The Undercommons, talk about this logic of colonialism, and the only way for colonialism to end is to make this barbaric logic of colonialism not make sense any longer – meaning that we must occupy or possess the language of the other, the other which has been rendered nonsensical and deranged and nonexistent by colonialism. In other words, you can’t reason with colonialism, you can’t use its logic but rather must inhabit the spaces that have been rendered invisible and absent by that logic.

TN: The Covid-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear the “fantasy turned horror” of national belonging in the belly of the beast. This is especially the case with the immigrant and low-wage laborers that have been deemed “essential” but at the same time exposed to amplified conditions of neglect. I was especially struck by your discussion of the contradictions of race, gender, and work in relation to The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold. (2016). I found your play with these ideas through the color vàng (yellow/gold in Vietnamese) incredibly profound.

HT: Part of the impulse in making this work for Hương and I was thinking about our mothers each being a parent with huge families and taking care of the family, running the household as well as doing paid labor in the workforce. It goes without saying that looking at those photos of our mothers, most viewers are not going to think of labor because it’s invisible and unpaid labor. We wanted to call attention to that matrix, that sense that we all have of our ourselves through our labor and to the contribution that we do in terms of our work. The layered aspect of this labor is that the master narratives that emerge about refugees and how they enter into a culture, and the cultural and social narrative around the U.S. is never based on economics, but actually that is the foundation for how the U.S. defines its immigration policies. It's always based on economic imperatives. While the American narrative, culturally speaking, shouts, “Immigrants steal our labor!”, immigration policies are defined by the need for that cheap economic labor.

By pairing the family photographs that don’t evoke labor at all – in fact they are the complete opposite, they are photographs of our families in leisure time – with the U.S. congressional reports that speak so plainly about this economic need is a way to hold these both in tension with each other: to challenge the cultural narratives that establish immigrants and refugees as other at the same time as recognizing the absolute economic reliance that the U.S. has on immigrant and refugee labor.While our starting point was thinking about labor, it came together with this question of what becomes legible within the wider American culture – within a culture that controls its cultural narrative so tightly in order to imagine and define what makes up the nation. In that narrative, Asian American families and identities have no currency in our contemporary culture. They have no value, no power. But these photographs of our mothers are ones that Hương and I value and cherish so much. I thought really specifically about using the photographs that I knew my mother loved and would be happy to see in the project. We wanted to make visible this vernacular narrative that is very common but that people don't normally see about Asian Americans or Vietnamese Americans and say, hey, here’s this beautiful material legacy, how can we see this differently? How can we value bodies differently? What we have learned to value is based on a racialized notion of labor and cultural capital. We have had to unlearn and dismantle our own internalized racism and judgement and shame of our own experiences in the face of these larger narratives that reify white supremacy and define what is valuable in our culture.

Both the title of the project gets at this, as well as the use of the color yellow, or vàng in Vietnamese. The title suggests that it's not a binary, it’s not a matter of being inside or outside the national narrative; it’s not a matter of being visible or invisible. These photographs suggest that just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it is not there. It’s just that you aren’t seeing it. Looking requires a kind of activation and a recognition. With the phrase, “the opposite of yellow is not gold,” we wanted to evoke this concept of vàng. In Vietnamese, the word for gold is yellow, and yellow is also gold, they are both the same word. And so we were playing on that double meaning. Yellow is not gold but gold is also yellow. The word yellow of course also connotes Asian people but is also a very powerful color in Vietnamese culture, symbolizing prosperity, happiness, and change. There’s a kind of simple claim to that word yellow, which also references Asian American activism of the 1960s and 1970s and the Yellow Power movement. The yellow that we chose to use as the paper background for re-photographing our family photos is a perfect sunset gold. The way that we photographed it creates a kind of visual vibration. The flatness of the image fights with its own depth because the yellow color is super rich so it appears to have this fullness, this feeling of infinity. So the physicality of the print is important to the work because that vibration and depth and flatness is experienced emotionally but also makes the viewer think about perspective and that slippage between the seemingly opposite characteristics of flatness and depth. But actually these two things can exist simultaneously.

TN: Your point about the co-existence of flatness and depth reminds me of the co-existence of other senses in your work, particularly the sonic and the visual. Can you discuss how you think through sound in your work? How does it play with, compliment, extend, or even frustrate the visual? How do you work with sound as a way to attune to race, histories of war, and trauma?

HT: I think of sound as a kind of response to the visual. Denying the visual can be a powerful way of provoking an affective response that relies more on the body, an internal response that is immersive rather than perspectival. Sound is already assumed to be subjective; it does not pretend to be objective. I am interested in sound because it’s such a physical experience. While vision is about what is on the outside, what is on the exterior or surface, hearing is all about what is on the inside, what’s internal; it provides you with a way inside of an event or a subject. When we see it kind of orients us to the world in a spatial way, and so while it is still bound up with time in interesting ways that are more thought-driven, it is not the powerful temporal sense in the way that hearing is. Because of this, I think sound and listening has so much potential as a kind of active, rather than passive, engagement.

I have used sound in ways to bring a viewer physically into a moment in time, and to frame the listener’s hearing experience that demands being attuned to their own subject position. In 2019 I worked on a new sound installation called War Sonics (How Are You GI Joe?), which used audio from the radio show called Radio Hanoi, which was on air during the American War in Việt Nam and was run by the North Vietnamese.

One of the announcers was a woman named Trịnh Thị Ngọ, who was known as Hanoi Hannah to U.S. soldiers. Her voice came through soldiers’ transistor radios, part of the acoustic landscape and contested aural topology of the war. I use her voice to think through the ways in which ideological battles were waged through the sonic. In her radio reports, Ngọ often addressed the soldiers directly, and was actually the first reporter in Việt Nam to make an account of the Detroit race riots back in the U.S. as it was unfolding in June of 1967. She says clearly in one of her now infamous reports: What are you doing here, soul brother? She speaks directly to Black American soldiers, she addresses them colloquially to signify a collectivity, a solidarity. She knew that using her voice was a way to emotionally connect to her listeners. During the war the U.S. also used sound to indoctrinate and propagate certain kinds of information. There was a U.S. military unit called Psychological Operations (PSYOP) which blasted amplified sounds and messages into the sonic spaces of the war through massive speakers that were attached to UH-1B helicopters.

Sound is a really important element to examine the politics of the sonic and listening in the context of race and violence. It’s about examining that political space of making oneself heard. It’s a space of disagreement and contradictions that allow the simultaneity of sound across time and space, which also leave traces of memory in its wake. Sound creates audiences that are both disconnected yet communal, atomized yet collective. I’m interested in this aspect of sound as a way to think about that aspect of how we imagine ourselves in relationship to others because that material experience of the voice is not natural or universal. It’s culturally and historically specific, and always tied to the meanings that we internalize about certain sounds and the body.

Lên Cơn (2018), Hồng-Ân Trương , Image courtesy of Rubber Factory Gallery and the artist — *Lên Cơn* (2018), Hồng-Ân Trương , Image courtesy of Rubber Factory Gallery and the artist

TN: Ngọ’s direct address and anti-imperial invitation to Black soldiers through the radio broadcast is incredible. The space of coalition across racial difference makes me think of your work, We Are Beside Ourselves (2018), especially the lên cơn section. Can you tell us more about this piece?

HT: We Are Beside Ourselves is a project that is still ongoing. My starting point is the archives of what might seem to be the familiar history of the 1960s and 1970s radical liberation movements. Using photography, lithographic prints, sound, and video, I re-present these materials to make legible a political genealogy that frames the intertwined relationships between the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. It also forges a material history for Asian American resistance, a history that frames the visualization of political identities in photographic terms of the legible and in sonic terms of the audible. It asks: What is unseen? What is unheard? What has been refused to be acknowledged? Through this work, I’m trying to suggest the powerful intimacies in political positions and attempt to cultivate a historical archive of solidarity.

The piece Lên Cơn that you are referring to consists of a sound piece of my friend Tin retelling me a story over the phone about getting a harassed by a man who drove by his house, got out of his truck, and proceeded to yell at him over his Fuck Trump sign in the front yard. In retelling the story to me, my friend Tin uses this phrase lên cơn to describe his response at a certain point later in the exchange with this person who is harassing him. It’s the only time in the entire conversation that someone might suddenly realize that the person they are listening to is Asian, or Vietnamese, because of his insertion of that Vietnamese phrase. It’s an abrupt rupture in the conversation in which the listener might have to contend with the assumptions they have made about the speaker up until that point. Tin speaks also with a kind of American southern accent, so it adds another layer of complexity to how a listener might “read” his voice. So I’m really interested in this aspect of listening and sound, how we respond to sonic cues that are culturally inflected. Again, I often use sound in my work as a way to think about collectivity. Listening is a phenomenological experience that structures how we relate to others, and language and speaking is a kind of cultural conditioning. Fanon conceptualized that speaking French, within a colonial context, was a way of being coerced into accepting the collective consciousness of the French. So how we speak, how we listen impacts our consciousness. The difficulty in “knowing” the voice of the speaker, I hope, calls attention to the non-fixedness of his subject position and the differentiated points of solidarity with others.

In this work, alongside the audio, I include a list of words that are printed on the wall that translate the phrase in Vietnamese, lên cơn. I crowd sourced different Vietnamese friends and family members’ interpretations and definitions of the phrase because it’s not such a straightforward translation. The phrase suggests a kind of intense state in which someone might appear to be crazy or hysterical. It can be interpreted as a physical state or an emotional state, like a physical sickness or a mental sickness. I thought the phrase was so interesting, because Tin used it to kind of express that in this moment of dealing with this toxic racist misogynist, he turned to this state of lên cơn as a kind of offensive action, as a kind of attack against this racist. And I was so struck by that, because it exemplified that idea that Moten and Harney talk about – the power of existing in this space of intelligibility, to occupy that place that has been rendered crazy and nonsensical through the logic of colonialism and white supremacy.

TN: Reclaiming the overpoliced site of the “crazy and nonsensical”, the lên cơn state, is such a powerful way to challenge the logic of white supremacy. This reminds me of the way you think about Eve Sedgewick’s theoretical analytic of the beside, which finds its way into the title as well: We Are Beside Ourselves (2018). Can you say more about how you use the analytic of the beside to think through race, coalitional politics, and radical solidarity?

HT: This project is about the material legacy of radical anti-racist movements, and attempts to trace the relationships between identity-centered groups in order to frame the way we think about our current antiracist work. The concept of beside is really powerful to me because it spatializes and makes physical the idea of solidarity. The phrase “we are beside ourselves,” also points to this heightened emotional state, this state in which one is so agitated or activated that one literally has stepped out of one’s body in order to make it through or continue on. Again, it ties back to this notion of that crazy space outside of the logic of colonialism, and this space that is invisible or illegible to those within that logic.

In the project, I literally put things next to each other that are often not narrated together for a broader public, for example, the 12 Point Program posters that different groups circulated (the Young Lords, I Work Kuen, and the White Panthers) modeled after the original Black Panther 12 Point Program. There is a lot of excellent scholarly work that makes these connections between the Black, Brown, and Yellow power movements but as such are often trying to argue for a certain reading of that time period and of solidarity work that is often totalizing. In the carbon transfer photographs I made, I printed on small mirrors that get framed with another mirror facing it. By doing this, the image gets reflected back to itself, the viewer’s face is also in the mirror depending on the angle of their viewing, or other photographs and prints get reflected back also, all depending on the angle of their viewing. So in the installation there’s a way that you can never look at something singularly, it’s always in relation to something else, a kind of ghosting presence that you cannot ignore.

We want freedom [October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program] (2018), Hồng-Ân Trương, Image courtesy of Rubber Factory Gallery and the artist — *We want freedom [October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program]* (2018), Hồng-Ân Trương, Image courtesy of Rubber Factory Gallery and the artist

One of the main things I am interested in this project is really looking at where these political histories that share a temporal moment rub up against each other, where there are intimacies that have been occluded from public narratives. I think about “beside” as a kind of intimacy, a space and position that Cindy Milstein in her book Rebellious Mourning has called intervulnerability. It’s a space that opens up the possibility for intersubjective knowledge. So the images that I chose to print, scouring through all of these archives of images from that time period, were these images that reveal an intimacy that we don’t normally see depicted.

I think the concept of “beside” is also really powerful in this moment because of the prevalence and problematics of cancel culture and the history of this aspect of “oppression Olympics” that have plagued us for a long time. So “beside” challenges both the vertical orientation of our thinking, and the binary and dualistic ways of seeing the world that we must constantly fight against.

TN: That’s a great way to think through some of the challenges that confront anti-austerity organizing in our contemporary moment and a reminder that they are also not unique to today, but that we have long struggled with it. Perhaps what is different about now is that these confrontations are amplified by the commodified and alienated mode of engagement we have with social media as a tool for organizing, one that opens up possibilities for reckoning (especially in the pandemic) but is also subject to pitfalls. In this context, we should heed the “beside” as a space of intervulnerability, a call for and model of the accountability we must be open to hold for one another.

HT: It’s similar to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s powerful notion of “speaking nearby” – an idea that challenges totalizing knowledge by suggesting the power in speaking from a place that comes close to the subject without ever taking hold of it. Within both Minh-ha’s and Sedgewick’s spatializing concepts are the potential for the power of the act of being or speaking, which is about change and transition, rather than being static or closure. Even though both these theorists come out of a burgeoning time for identity politics, I think of them as being staunchly against the dogmatism that has become the gross and violent and damaging logic of identity politics.

Radical solidarity isn’t about seizing and sedimenting one’s identity position in a vertical sense, but rather about this intimacy beside and nearby that allows for an open flow in and between inside and outside, between the self and the other.There are so many ways that people are practicing this everyday in their political work. I see it where I live with the people I organize with, and I see it in other spaces and cities that inspire me. So it happens, and has happened, but it also never gets narrativized this way because popularized histories like to be totalizing and sensational, and this kind of history is too both too messy and too banal.

TN: Hồng-Ân, thank you so much for spending this time with us at UC Santa Cruz. Your generosity and brilliance is unparallelled.

Trung P.Q. Nguyen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. His research examines the aesthetics of permanent war and racial capitalism in the aftermath of Vietnam.

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