Return Engagements

“Việt Lê writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

“Việt Lê moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism.” — Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

"In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Vi?t Lê explores the multiple valences of return—as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." — Penny Edwards, Sojourn

"From the registers of academic writing to personal voice, the book provides a thought-provoking analysis of historical return and captures a worldview made by the transcultural citizens produced through violent and peaceful displacements." — Bùi Kim Ðinh, Journal of Vietnamese Studies

"Pamela N. Corey’s and Viêt Lê’s detailed studies are a boon for students and scholars of Southeast Asia and of so-called global contemporary art. More than this, though, the books insist that greater intersections between these two fields of study—Southeast Asia and global contemporary art—will be mutually generative." — Roger Nelson, Art Journal

"Lê’s Return Engagements is a welcome addition to scholarship on Southeast Asian cultural production. Lê’s emphasis on diaspora’s multimodal returns rather than one-way movement and on the dangers of recuperative models of trauma and memory and liberal multiculturalist approaches to representation as emancipatory, and his articulations of strategic cartographies within the context of neoliberal global markets and global racial capitalism, provide a transnational approach that blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries and reorients essentialist approaches to Southeast Asian art and visual culture."