UCI Assistant Professor of criminology, law & society Eraldo Souza dos Santos hosts the documentary-in-progress event with alum Nguyen Tan Hoang ('99, MFA studio art), who is an associate professor of literature and cultural studies at UC San Diego.
In 1979, fleeing from Communist persecution, Hoang and his family escaped Vietnam by boat. "We were attacked repeatedly by Thai pirates," Hoang says. "After a week of drifting about without an engine, our boat was rescued by a West German ship." The Germans dropped the family off at a refugee camp on Pulau Tengah, a small island in Malaysia in the South China Sea. After a year and a half on the island-camp, the family was sponsored by Hoang's uncle, and they emigrated to America.
Forty-five years later, Hoang returned to Pulau Tengah. In the place of the camp, is Batu Batu, an eco-resort designated as a Marine Protected Area (MPA)—a sanctuary for “endangered sea turtles, coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass meadows.” This documentary-in-progress maps the physical disappearance of the former refugee camp as it has been repackaged into an eco-marketed resort. The project explores themes of memory, displacement, and survival in the face of rapid capitalist changes. Traumatic traces guide the documentary’s backward journey into vulnerability, reminding us of our complicity with, and resistance to, geopolitical and ecological violence.
Hoang is interested in Asian American visual culture, Southeast Asian cinema, race and pornography, and homo-sex archives. They earned a BA in Art and Art History from UC Santa Cruz, an MFA in Studio Art from UC Irvine, and PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. Their publications include the monograph A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Duke University Press, 2014) and essays in Camera Obscura, Visual Anthropology, Porn Archives, and The Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and Media. Their experimental videos include Forever Bottom!, PIRATED!, K.I.P., and Eavesdropping on Jason Sato’s Brothers. Their videos have screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Getty Center (LA), the Pompidou Center (Paris), the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin).
Direct questions about this event to dos Santos at eraldo.souzadossantos@uci.edu.
