Organizer: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University

Type/Location: In Person / New Haven, CT

Description:

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale for a talk by Quan Tue Tran, Senior Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Professor Tran’s lecture explores contemporary Vietnamese and Angolan connections through the lens of Quang Linh Vlogs, created by a young Vietnamese migrant who worked and lived in Angola. 

Abstract:

Relations between Asia and Africa are enacted and sustained in myriads of ways. This talk explores contemporary Vietnamese and Angolan connections through the lens of Quang Linh Vlogs. Created by a young Vietnamese migrant who worked and lived in Luanda, Angola between 2016 and 2024 to document his experiences and the experiences of those around him, this popular YouTube channel has more than 4 million subscribers and posted over 1,800 videos, which have been viewed and commented on by hundreds of millions of people. The Quang Linh Vlogs YouTube channel yields a rich and fascinating digital archive of how historical, political, social, cultural, technological, and economic forces of the twenty-first century converge to foster new connections and relationships between contemporary Vietnamese and Angolans. These videos as well as their transnational circulations and the commentaries about them provide new insights into the possibilities and limitations of cross-cultural collaboration, decolonization, globalization, migration, human relations, and diasporic formations. They also reveal the uneven power dynamics that also exist and facilitate in these encounters.

About the Speaker:

Quan Tue Tran is Senior Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include critical refugee studies; Vietnamese diaspora studies; Asian American studies; migration studies; memory studies; and food studies. Her scholarly publications appear in journals such as Memory Studies, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies; Amerasia Journal; the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement; and in edited volumes including Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory; Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-first Century Perspectives; and Asian America: A Primary Source Reader. Her book manuscript, Anchoring Vietnamese Boat People’s History and Memory, examines refugee identity, community, and cultural formations in the Vietnamese diaspora by tracing the late twentieth century Vietnamese boat refugee exodus and contemporary efforts in commemorating that mass migration in Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Australia, North America and cyberspace. Dr. Tran is also a published poet and translator.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.