Michitake Aso
University at Albany, SUNY
My work investigates the intertwined histories of bodies and the environment in Vietnam over the last two hundred years. It adopts the idea of mixed environments to study how bodily labor has helped to both symbolically and materially construct human and non-human natures. My book, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam, explores the mixed environments of rubber production and plantation labor in colonial and postcolonial southern Vietnam. It argues that rubber, particularly as grown on plantations, helped set in motion political, economic, social, and ecological changes during the colonial era that have partly defined the postcolonial era as well. In other words, Vietnamese nationalist governments found it difficult to alter the labor and environmental relationships created to make rubber plantations work because these relationships were written onto the land, and human bodies, themselves.
My book adopts an ecological perspective, or attention to environmental and bodily processes, that recognizes continuities across regimes with very divergent politics. It also considers how such an ecological perspective might shed new light on discontinuities across these political regimes and nuance our understanding of these discontinuities. In this way, my work highlights the silent role of non-human nature in previous histories. It also asks how the work needed to create colonial mixed environments continues to reverberate to this day and how it helps frame current debates about the effects of, and appropriate responses to, climate change and other environmental threats to the health of Vietnamese bodies and environments.
