10-30-25 – From Refugees to ‘Non-Criminal Collaterals’: Immigration after the Vietnam War and Now with Ben Tran

Thursday, October 30, 2025
4 PM – 5:30 PM
120 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Please register here.

This lecture explores the contrasting policies directed at refugees following the Vietnam War and the racialized criminalization of migrants today. It analyzes how the socio-political climate of the late 1970s and 1980s facilitated a relatively robust support system for Vietnamese refugees in the United States, characterized by humanitarian aid, community-building efforts, and federal programs aimed at integration. In contrast, the immigration landscape in the US today is more draconian, influenced by shifting political narratives and contexts. This paper further compares these differences by underscoring Vietnam’s post-civil war nation-state and the history of Asian migrants to the US. Contemporary capitalism, the paper argues, has reached a new register of profiteering from and exploitation of “illegal aliens.”

This talk is brought to you by the BU College of Fine Arts School of Music, Center for the Study of Asia at the Pardee School, Office for the Arts, and the Center on Forced Displacement. With grant support from the BU Center for the Humanities.

Ben Tran is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University. He researches and teaches the politics and aesthetics of twentieth- and twenty-first century Southeast Asian, Asian American, and Anglophone literatures. He is the author of Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (2017); and his work has been published in Cultural Critique, PMLA,  positions: asia critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ben Tran’s current scholarship has two trajectories. The first project traces how the biological necessity of breathing has become a universal right to breath that we must now fight for, amid the weaponization of the atmosphere, increasingly transnational police tactics, and the history of air conditioning. The second, entitled Digital Coolie-ism, examines how Asian migration during 19th-century European imperialism intersects with the current border-control system and the increasing use of biodata.