Description:

TALK BY Ann Ngoc Tran: The Boat of No Smiles: A Counterhistory of the Vietnamese Refugee Diaspora

This talk interrogates the Boat of No Smiles as a turning point in U.S. refugee policy, examining how Eddie Adams' haunting photographs constructed a visual economy of rescue that simultaneously erased those left behind. By foregrounding disappearance, containment, and what she calls non-arrival, Tran's work challenges migration histories that privilege legibility and arrival, instead theorizing absence as an active condition that shapes refugee memory, nation-state borders, and historical narratives.

Ann Ngoc Tran is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the social and material histories of Southeast Asian refugees as they encounter the violent edifices of nation-states, borders, and global capital, with a specific focus on Vietnamese diasporic histories that transcend national and theoretical boundaries of arrival. She is a current AAUW Dissertation Fellow and a USC-Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow.