“What do you hold on to during this moment of political unrest? How do you move forward in the face of multiple political crises?" In other words, how do you keep sight of hope during a time of such despair? These were some of the questions posed to a pair of Vietnamese American writers and artists on a panel entitled “Then & Now: Reflecting on 50 Years,” hosted by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on April 26, 2025. “50 Years” denotes the half a century that has passed since the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975: a world-making event commemorated as the “Fall of Saigon” across the Vietnamese American diaspora and “Liberation Day” in communist-unified Vietnam. As the daughter and granddaughter of Vietnamese refugees who left Vietnam in 1975, I attended the event to be in community—to hold space, mark time; to reflect collectively on the past and peer forward towards an uncertain future.  

“I find myself reaching for the sublime,” answered An-My Lê, a Vietnamese diasporic landscape photographer based in New York. “I reach for the expanse of the stars and the line of the horizon, the meeting point where the sky touches the mountainous peaks.” She was referring to Dark Star, a recent series shot in 2024 at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, the ancestral homelands of native Pueblo peoples. Earlier work focused on landscapes of war—sweeping aerial photographs of the desert training grounds at 29 Palms in California and intimate close-ups of Vietnam War re-enactors in the forests of Virginia—and more domestic scenes of militarized violence—statues of Confederate soldiers before their toppling in Louisiana and portraits of postwar Vietnam during the 1990s. 

Lê acknowledged that her turn to nature may be seen as a retreat, a capitulation to the terrors of the current Trump administration. And yet, what Lê may be asking us to do is to attune to violence on a different spatial and historical scale: to understand the long histories of settler colonial displacement that made the preservation of national parks possible, and the shifts in global climate change that are changing the landscapes of Mesa Verde. And yet, and yet—perhaps we are also being asked to consider hope on a grander scale: to acknowledge the acuteness of the present political crises, and to nonetheless turn to the heavens, to the sublime, for a sense of solace and awe, that no political government can take away. Dark Star, reviewer Rae Quinn writes, “captures the night sky from the ground up . . . as it might have been observed in wonderment by the Ancestral Pueblo people 1,400 years ago.” The scale of the American nation—which has always excluded, has always produced refugees—can only have so strong of a hold on our lives. What would it mean to privilege a different perspective?

At the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, where this series debuted on January 10, 2025, just ten days before Trump’s second inauguration, Dark Star was paired with another recent series, Grey Wolf, which “tackle[s] the hiding-in-plain sight military subject of nuclear missile silos buried in the farmlands and mountain foothills of Montana. The title of the project,” writes Loring Knoblauch, “refers to the Grey Wolf helicopters used to protect and support the ballistic missile sites.” The series more obviously connects to Lê’s earlier oeuvre, which captures landscapes of war with a quiet grandeur that neither sensationalizes nor glorifies. Dark Star may seem like a departure, but perhaps it is best understood as in dialogue. Knoblauch concludes: “Lê’s quietly anxious missile silo landscapes are inherently more energized and unsettling, but perhaps the skyscapes can soften that grim simmering tension, asking us to see time and space (and our place in them) with wider and more forgiving measures.” A wider frame offers greater glimmers of star-dusted hope.

In “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” German-Jewish critical theorist and refugee Walter Benjamin writes, “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.” Constellations, as an analytic, encourage us to view objects in relation, to draw connections between spaces and times to better grasp the complexity of big ideas. Constellations, as a method, invites us to consider the Vietnam War in relation to the present-day Trump administration, Vietnamese refugees in relation to displaced Pueblo peoples. To constellate is to bring together seemingly disparate concepts into the same conceptual orbit, probing the new meanings and structures that arise. 

This year as an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, I have been exploring “southern constellations” as a method for bringing together three southern spaces: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Both South Korea and South Vietnam were spaces of US intervention, which aligned with the US in the Cold War order and were therefore seemingly outside of a Global South politics typically associated with socialist revolution and the Third World Liberation movement. When South Vietnamese and South Korean refugees and migrants came to the US South, they encountered a different north-south political geography, a different political referent for “civil war.” How do Asian Cold War discourses and refugee understandings of southern history and southern culture change when they are interpellated by a different racial politics—that of a US nation-state shaped by slavery, Indigenous genocide, and anti-Blackness?

“Southern constellations” refers to analytical lines and connections drawn between different southern spaces to elucidate how the “South” operates as a political concept, vis-à-vis an imagined “North.” I probe how discourses of southern freedom and victimhood, which project the north as a space of perceived threat, are mobilized to justify oftentimes violent politics: anti-communism and anti-Blackness, militarization and securitization. Rather that apprehend one southern space in isolation, southern constellation attends to the historical flow of ideas, people, war, and culture across multiple southern spaces, even as it takes seriously the distinct sociopolitical forces shaping each southern site. Each southern site exists as its own particular entity—a distinct star, if you will—that can and should be analyzed on its own terms. But it is the creativity and agency of the constellator—the beholder, the researcher—that can craft an analytical narrative to make a particular constellation of southern spaces come startlingly into view. 

While hope is not necessarily a key term for this project, this Colloquy invites me to consider constellations of hope from the perspective of the south—namely, surprising juxtapositions of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. I’ll start first with a point of contrast, a public event that partly undergirded the impetus for this project: the January 6 Capitol Riot. In the opening days of 2021, thousands of protestors stormed our nation’s capital, refusing the outcome of the 2020 election. What drew my attention, and the attention of many Vietnamese Americans, was the stark concurrence of South Vietnamese flags flying alongside Confederate flags at the riot, evidencing uncanny relationalities between South Vietnam and a particular iteration of the US South—two short-lived, now defunct nations—in this critical moment of political upheaval. In response, Vietnamese American scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in a Washington Post article dated January 14, 2021: “In America, white nationalists and Vietnamese nationalists share a common condition: a radicalized nostalgia for a lost country and a lost cause.”  

There are many reasons why Vietnamese Americans support Trump and the Republican Party more broadly: a lingering anti-communism that imperfectly maps onto conservatism in the United States; a resentment towards China, which conquered Vietnam for almost a millennium; a distrust of newer waves of migrants, who enter the US along different pathways. And yet, perhaps there are openings for hope, for those of us who are concerned about how Cold War pasts may seem to dictate our current political possibilities. Perhaps there are glimmers of new directions.

The contest for the House seat representing California’s 45th Congressional District in Orange County was one of the closest, and most closely watched, races of the 2024 election. Two-term Republican incumbent Michelle Steel, a Korean American, had made inroads with the district’s Asian American, and particularly Vietnamese American, voting population by appealing to anti-communist sensibilities and utilizing red-scare tactics that demonized China. Challenging her was Democratic political newcomer Derek Tran: a son of Vietnamese refugees, US Army veteran, and former consumer rights attorney. Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, who heavily favored the GOP, had never voted from a Democrat before. Would they do so now? How would they perceive the legacies of the Korean War, which had shaped Steel’s family’s immigration story, vis-à-vis the Vietnam War? What southern constellations would emerge?

Despite their different political positions, both candidates leaned heavily on anti-communist rhetoric in their messaging to Vietnamese American voters, tapping into the enduring relevance of Cold War politics. Steel also tried to appeal to a narrow sense of identity politics, claiming in an interview with VietFace TV that she was “more Vietnamese” than Tran: “My opponent might have a Vietnamese name, but I understand the Vietnamese community.” Tran, in turn, emphasized his family background, identifying as a child of boat refugees, and underscored his patriotism, presenting himself as a US veteran. A cynic may disparage Tran’s deployment of family history to win votes as a crass form of identity politics. And yet, a more hopeful reading is that Tran attempted to route Vietnamese refugee histories through a new political trajectory: one not so deterministically tied to conservative politics and Cold War holdovers. He dared to envision a new way forward. And for his efforts, he won.

Of course, electoral politics remain within the frame of the nation—a scale that, as Lê’s invocation of the sublime reminds us, can only offer so much. And so, to conclude, let us turn to the scale of the body. In “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” the eponymous Vietnamese American poet encourages Ocean to hold onto hope, to “get up” and “don’t be afraid”: 

. . . The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. 

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, as we reflect on the past and where we’ve come from, we cannot help but face forward towards an unknown future. And what are our bodies if not stardust, the embodied memories of constellations? What is the beautiful precarity of our hope, despite everything, if not an instantiation of the sublime? And so, we resist and persist, we survive and we thrive. As refugees and their descendants, we reach for the stars, remaking the world anew.