Join Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of NYU's Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, as she discusses her new book, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2021). The book examines the afterlife of the Vietnam War, and its continued impact on our understanding of race and beauty.

Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, materially and metaphorically, Tu foregrounds the histories of US militarism, biomedical investigations, chemical warfare, and the bodies of African American soldiers and prisoners, and Vietnamese civilians who were the subjects of research and remediation, in order to advance a theory of aesthetic and politics urgently relevant to contemporary theorizations of colonial modernity and the lives lived in its shadows. Matthew Frye Jacobson (Yale University) writes, “Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.”

After a presentation from Tu, Anne Cheng (Princeton University), Avery Gordon (Emerita, University of California Santa Barbara), lê thi diem thúy (Hampshire College), and Chandan Reddy (University of Washington) participate in a roundtable.

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