Trung Nguyen
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Assistant Professor Department of Sociology & Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
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Current Research Activities
His research examines the historical and emergent relationships between visual culture, permanent war, labor, value, mediation, gender, and racial capitalism.
He is currently working on a book manuscript, Loss in Perpetuity: Necrovalue, Iterative Vietnam, and the Racial Mediation of Permanent War, which examines how loss gets disciplined and mobilized for counterinsurgent purposes by the state apparatuses of permanent war. Examining photomagazines, film, newspaper, and other indexes of the visual, this book examines comparative racial subject formation in the context of racial capitalism, war-making, theories of value, and death through the Vietnamese figure. Loss in Perpetuity identifies how the racialized, gendered refugee has been used to create specific and new forms of value extraction out of loss and displacement. In turn, this book explores how Vietnam and Vietnamese refugees are deployed as the ideal object lesson of state-sponsored, premature loss, and thus used to reinstate its structure of violence’s management in other episodes of empire’s mass displacements — Central America, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond.
